I want to speak as someone who knows why she treated her brother the way that I did and someone who regrets doing so when we were young and has expressed that regret and apologized and yet have a brother who is still stuck and fails to comprehend our different perspectives growing up. I was my mother's firstborn. I was the only remnant of a marriage that did not work and if not for her sense of responsibility she would not have raised me on any level. She was always before my brother was born the "you just like your father" abusive physically and emotionally kind of mother. She made me afraid that it could take any behavior not to her liking would force me out of the security of our living conditions. Even years later when she remarried I was treated like the fish outside the fishbowl and she blatantly treated my brother, the off-spring of my stepfather better. Even to this day, so many examples of her emotional abandonment, apathy, and hatred of me. I knew at some point she was capable of loving someone because I witnessed her being affectionate and loving to my stepbrother. So I had a tendency to act out. I was at times made to take him with me when I went to the park and when we were very young I would threaten to leave him. The stuff I did was as a result of feeling as if he had the parents I did not have and the love and affection from my mother that I did not have also. I know these are excuses, but back then when young, I did not know how to process how she was treating me. Even as an adult, having known my stepfather since I was four years old, my mother never told me he had died and they had a funeral. She was heard to have said that he treated me better than his own son. As if I had control of how he treated me. He treated me when she was not blocking him from doing so like a daughter. In any case, as I started this off, I have always been willing to talk, listen apologize, and have thought of my brother as my younger brother and I as his older sister. It is about time, growth, maturity, and the willingness to recognize that even where I was emotional, I had a hand in hurting him emotionally and owning it. Yet, the door to communication and reconciliation has always been on his part the door being closed tightly. I am on the other end hoping that before either or both of us meet our maker he forgives me and we can be adult siblings who have grown up and matured past our childhood hurts.