Jayda Week 3: Finally an Only Child

    Ever since my brother, Jacob, started high school, people had asked how I was feeling about him moving out within the next few years. I would always respond by explaining how happy I would be without him in the house. Why wouldn’t I want the person I had argued with 24/7 to move out? I was convinced that everything would be better without him, but I couldn't have been more wrong.

    Over the course of last year (his senior year and my freshman year), Jacob and I started to become obligated to do certain things together. This included small things like driving to school, doing chores, etc. This became part of my daily routine, and I had never expected losing it to have the effect on me that it ended up having.

    At first, it was only the small things that seemed different. Things as small as taking a picture together on the first day of school, as we had done every year for the past ten years. Then I started to notice other things, such as missing him driving us to school while blasting the weirdest songs that we could find. I even miss barging into his room without permission to just sit on his bed until I got kicked out. He always had a prominent (and very loud) presence in our house, and without him, it became so much more silent. I would tell him my problems, he would claim he didn't care, and we would both move on, but it was moments like those that I had come to appreciate the most. All of these things have helped me realize that over the course of only one year, our relationship had improved so much. I barely got to appreciate the stable relationship that we had as siblings because I hadn’t noticed that he had become one of the people I relied on the most. We may have still bickered, but it was the most progress we had ever made, and I wish that I had gotten to appreciate it more before he left for college (but don’t tell him that).

Do you ever feel like you take things for granted?