I’m a dozen years older than my baby brother, Ross. For as long as I can remember, we’ve had a strange relationship – he’d rat me out for exceeding the 55 mph speed limit in my Ford Escort while driving him to kindergarten; I’d have to explain to him that yes, Lenny Kravitz was a big deal in the early 90s before that Butterfly song.
Still, I love Ross and he’s the only one of my three siblings to have as tortured a path as I had through the college years. (It took me six years to earn a bachelor’s degree. Ross is on track to smash that record by at least a year, probably two.) We’re not close, but I love him. And I suspect that I understand him, more than I ever will most other people on this Earth.
Except that there’s an outside chance that my baby brother Ross, at the entirely too young age of 23, might be headed for premature parenthood.
First things first: yes, plenty of people have kids at 23 and do just fine. But Ross is Not Ready. He lives in my mother’s basement, and while my mother doesn’t mind having her not-quite-grown son amble his way through college while dwelling belowstairs, she’s drawing the line at a grandchild.
Also in residence in the basement, semi-officially, is Ross’ girlfriend/baby-mama-elect, Tara. There was no official conversation to change the living arrangement from Momma Bear/Baby Bear to Three’s Company. My mother reports that one day his girlfriend was just there An Awful Lot and then she started getting mail.
We’ve since learned that Tara was Raised By Wolves. Her father is a mere two years older than me, meaning that he was all of an august 15 when Tara joined the human race. Better yet, Tara wasn’t his first child. Nor was she his last.
My family’s attitude towards Tara is mixed. We’re rather understanding that she hasn’t had much of a chance, but she’s still not our first choice for our brother. Ross tends to be a bit of a slacker – I took years to finish college, but I never actually failed out of a school. And while I had a lot of jobs and teetered on the edge of financial ruin, I always pulled through and righted myself without help. Tara tends to quit jobs just ’cause and run up credit card debt with cavalier disregard for future consequences.
If Ross loves her, we’ll love her. But we’d rather he love someone with a bit more gumption.
Complicating factors is the fact that Tara is, well, heavy. Not just heavy – over 200 pounds. Tara is downright fat. In a family of active women who are a bit obsessive about what we eat, she stands out. Way out. Her wardrobe consists mostly of XL sweatshirts and jeans a size or three too small, paired with sneakers.
This is mean of us, to hold this against her.
As it turns out, her doctor suspects that the reason for Tara’s Very Delayed Cycle is all of that weight gain. She’s put on 45 pounds in the past few months, making her well over 100 pounds overweight. So while she’s gone for a blood test to confirm or deny her impending motherhood, more than one urine test has already come back negative.
I’m hopeful that I’m not about to be Aunt Indie, that Kyd and Chloe aren’t about to have a same-aged cousin. It’s just not what I want for him – early parenthood, almost certain to trap him in a cycle of dead end jobs and render him permanently reliant on our nearing-retirement mother’s largess.
It’s a hopeless cliche to talk about how raising kids is so hard, but there it is. The toughest job you’ll ever love, blah blah blah. And while Jimdear says that maybe it’s what Ross needs to grow him up – finally – I can’t help think that no child deserves to come into life as an experiment.
I’m not ready to be Aunt Indie. Not yet.
