The Rock and My Brother

Maybe a bit of background... Tonight I was at Teague's soccer game. (For those of you who don't know Teague, he's my six-year-old brother who has quite the personality.) He had a hard time focusing on the game today. When he was going on for the last few minutes of the game, our neighbors said, "Come on Teague, show us your super powers!" Meaning, of course, "soccer" powers, but Teague took it otherwise. He ran around the field moving his arms trying to do something super while half-heartedly trying to kick the ball. I was in pain watching, worried someone would think he was slow because they don't know his imagination like I do. (He inherited it from me, poor kid.) The same "super power" neighbors watched him for a moment, listened to me calling, "Run Teague! Kick the ball!", and said, "He's funny." I wanted to cry, but instead wrote this:

The six-year-old boy reaches down and picks up a small, black rock off the asphalt. “I want to take this rock home,” he says. I can’t help but ask why. “It’s different,” he explains, “I’m going to take it home, and it will be beautiful.” Little does he know that he is explaining himself more than the rock. The boy is my brother, the most amazing child in the whole world, in my opinion. He knew how to work a DVD player at age three, and now can manage to not scratch the discs. He loves to play with his friends, and worries that they don’t want to play with him if he finds they can’t play time after time after time. He is diabetic, and knows what he can and can’t have without a shot. He can his body’s blood sugar level almost as well as I can read mine, and he’s eleven years my junior. And he has a strong love for his family, to the point that he gets distracted when we’re away too long, and tries to make my day better when he knows I’ve had a hard one.

And yet, most people don’t see that. They see the boy who gets shy and silly when company comes, the boy who is obsessed with video games, the boy who plays soccer yet doesn’t care about getting the ball. And they always say, “He is so funny.” I know they’re trying to be nice, but it offends me. He is much, much more than “funny,” and in a few years they will see that. In a few years he will be better at speaking. In a few years he will be better able to control himself in a crowd. In a few years, he will be able to tell people he’s special instead of me thinking it so violently that someone must be able to hear my thoughts.

Yes, he doesn’t speak as well as most six-year-olds. Yes, he is sillier than most people are used to. But he is a child of God, and he is my brother. I see in him what others can’t, and so I DECLARE TO THE WORLD THIS DAY THAT MY BROTHER IS MORE THAN JUST FUNNY. HE IS MORE THAN JUST CUTE. HE IS A BRIGHT, SENSITIVE, PLAYFUL, LOVING SIX-YEAR-OLD BOY. And I love him more than I love anyone else’s child who can speak with a larger vocabulary, who doesn’t act like a dog around my friends, who can make a goal in a soccer game. I love my brother, not despite who he is, but because of who he is.