I am an only child, but I never have been a lonely child. I had the good fortune of growing up with a cousin who was a year younger than I was. I was his boss and he was my demon. We were as thick as thieves, as the saying goes. Of course, I was the mastermind, and he was the lackey. Whenever we did something wrong, I ran as quickly as I could to hide. My cousin always stood there and took the brunt of the blame. We fought each other like hell, but in retrospect, I know that it was only because we loved each other so much.
I feel terribly sorry for my younger cousin. I've been babysitting him for the past two days, but he's eight. And something about being twice his age makes me lose my patience with his antics. I can't understand his inner intrigues. It's hard for me to understand him most of the time because he speaks so sweetly and softly.
I can hear him, even now, as I write this blog post, gallivanting in the small space of the hallway, trying to devise a game for himself. Every couple of minutes he comes in and dances and asks me to put something on the internet, but I cannot. I haven't the time. I'm rewriting an essay that I bombed with a capital B, so I've been very short and impatient with him.
I'm letting him down, just like every psuedo-adult in his life. He's got no one to share his little inner turmoils and triumphs. I can't be that person for him. I don't understand what he wants the way I used to when I took care of him and I was ten and he was two, or when I was twelve and he was four. Something about those ages before fourteen made being those ages mutually intelligible. I was always the nice one to him back then. Now I seem like the bitch in comparison to my other cousin who used to play too roughly.
I play too roughly with his self-esteem. I'm sorry.
No comments:
Post a Comment