by Clare Callow

Created on: February 20, 2009

I am the youngest of a crazily large family. Despite the usual way things go, I was not the most treasured, pampered one of the lot. In fact, my position at the bottom of the ladder gave me all the more room to look up at them and see how they needed help.

I learned many times that you can't pick up the pieces for your brothers and sisters, but I don't know how long it will take me to actually absorb my lesson. I suspect I never will who can? But I have learned that, for my own sanity and for the health of my relationship with my family, sometimes, no matter how horrible it feels, I just have to let them go do things and not help afterward. How horrible is that?

My first lesson in letting go came from my eldest brother. He is an alcoholic, and bipolar. It sounds far more sordid and far less personal when I put it that way, but there it is. One of my earliest memories of him is watching him drink a beer and being terribly worried because I knew he was an alcoholic and shouldn't drink beer. When I asked about it, my family laughed, and, embarrassed at questioning the grown-ups about something they obviously knew more about, I never asked about it again.

That's the thing about my siblings. When I was very small, my siblings were going through their teenage years. I spent my time quietly, and not so quietly, studying them, watching them, and eventually worrying about them. Being the youngest, my concern for them was considered laughable, plain stupidity instead of an expression of child-like love. This is understandable, as teenagers naturally don't think their eight-year-old sister could be of any help when they wind up pregnant, or get caught driving without a license. But as the years rolled on, they continued to laugh, forgetting that when they had left home and were having their grown-up disasters, it was me at home smoothing things over with our parents.

The final straw with my brother came when he disappeared for a year. I'd suggested to my family that he had a problem beyond alcohol, but as usual wasn't listened to. It turned out that he was having paranoid episodes and the culmination of it was his disappearance. What he left behind was a shocked family, with me internally wondering how anyone could have not seen it coming. But I was there, calling Mum to make sure she was okay, trying to reassure Dad. I told myself not to expect anything but disaster from him ever again.

Then there was another final straw, when he would call, drunk and stoned, wanting to talk. Or the other final straw when he drunkenly shouted at my five-year-old niece on Christmas Day. Or the other final straw...

The thing is, and I don't doubt that many others know this, you can't just leave it alone when it comes to love for your siblings. Something happens, you swear you'll never get involved again, but let a few years pass and you can't help it. You can resolve to do a lot of things, but the one thing you can't do is stop loving someone just because you want to. I guess that's why nobody ever really stops picking up after their siblings.

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