Different Battles, Same Wounds
The story of my brother
We never really knew each other. And yet, we both lived in the same war zone.
My brother is the last person I want to introduce from my family.
Not because he's the least important, but because he's the most distant. Emotionally, physically, in every possible way.
He’s six years older than me. And although we shared a childhood under the same roof, he remained more like a shadow in the background. He had little influence on who I became, and yet I’ve come to understand how deeply our stories are connected.
He was the firstborn.
And I believe he had it harder.
Not just because he was different, but because my mother kept choosing him as her target.
He had good grades until fifth grade.
We both had to be “the good ones” in her eyes. Otherwise, it meant shame.
I don’t know what exactly happened back then. Maybe he gave up pretending, or something inside him just broke. But his performance dropped, and year after year, it got worse.
I heard so many times that my parents told him to come downstairs while I had to go upstairs. They yelled at him loudly because of his grades in school. I didn’t really hear anything except my mother’s voice. Then I saw my brother come back up with tears in his eyes. He closed the door, and that was when we called it a day.
At the end of primary school, gymnasium was out of reach.
He went to a regular high school and started training as a hairdresser, just like our father once did.
He never really had a choice.
In our family, there was no space to explore who we were. We had to grow up too early, too fast.
No one expects a 14-year-old to know what they want.
But in our family, it wasn’t just that we didn’t know.
It was that we weren’t allowed to explore.
We had to serve our mother’s needs and try to survive the atmosphere we called home.
So he dropped out.
No diploma. No job. No direction.
He did what many in our small town did.
He commuted to Austria for hard agricultural work.
I remember the first day he came home from the fields. I saw my mother’s face and I will never forget it. There was satisfaction in her eyes as she watched my brother walk in, dirty, broke, and exhausted.
She looked at him and said with a smile:
“See? Now you know too that life is hard and work sucks.”
We grew apart.
I surrounded myself with students, people who read, who travel, who ask questions.
He was into cars, earrings, tuning engines, drinking, smoking, racing.
We no longer spoke the same language, literally and emotionally.
And honestly, I didn’t try to bridge the gap either.
I had my own mission.
To escape from home and study hundreds of miles away.
His way of thinking felt alien.
Our mother didn’t accept him.
Nothing he did was good enough. Not his clothes, not his hair, not his girlfriends.
Whatever he tried to build, she tore down.
He became insecure, if he hadn’t always been.
I remember one time, back when I still lived at home, my mother asked loudly and rhetorically:
“I don’t know why your brother has no confidence.”
Thinking about it today, I find myself asking a similar question, but in a different tone: How could she not know why he had none?
He moved out. Came back. Moved out again.
He tried to escape too, but with fewer options and no stable influence around him.
I know now that he suffered.
Differently than I did.
He was scared of our mother. He never confronted her.
He digested everything in silence.
I remember how he would hide in his room, playing music loud enough to drown out the fights.
Or maybe he just wanted a few minutes without her voice.
One day, he came back again.
By then, I no longer lived at home.
He met a woman in our town, a single mother of three, and moved in with her.
They got married.
My mother said she no longer had a son.
“She’s fat,” she said. “She’s poor. He married a cow.”
That was the final drop in his glass.
He never came back after that.
We were never close.
He didn’t play with me. He didn’t care about me.
I think he was jealous. I got better grades, more praise, became the “better” child.
Even at parties, we weren’t brothers.
We saw each other, nodded, and kept going.
We never truly met as family.
I don’t blame us.
We both fought to survive, just in different ways.
He withdrew and hid.
I fought back and stood in the line of fire.
We carry the same wounds, but we dealt with them differently.
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