My husband and I found our way forward relying only on ourselves, while our younger siblings always seemed to benefit from lavish support from our parents. We never felt entitled, truly, and we knew our parents owed no one a thing, but it was peculiar to watch them shower our siblings with unearned abundance. The sense of unevenness echoes in my mind, as if in a strange, sprawling house with endless corridors.
I recall, for example, how Father handed my brother a gleaming, new Ford Mondeo, keeping the battered Ford Escort for himself. Later, we heardthrough that peculiar word-of-mouth that moves like mistthat my brother and his wife had slipped into a roomy London flat that had been left by Granddad, simply because theyd shared their happy news about getting married. Theres a ten-year gap between us, and before the wedding, our parents treated me and my husband like visitors at a garden partygracious but aloof. But when my brother announced his engagement, a cloud seemed to lift, and suddenly he was ushered behind the velvet rope and handed the keys.
I remember the strange, floaty feeling of asking Mum about all thisthe way she helped my brother so willingly, but never offered us anything. Her words drifted oddly: Did you ever ask for anything? Have you seen your kitchen? Havent you noticed you dont own a car? Her words left me wading through fragments of old memoriesme and my husband hauling furniture up narrow stairs as we tried to carve out a life, our child arriving and us moving into a flat furnished with one old armchair and a kettle that whistled like a clown at a circus. We barely let a doctor see our baby when she was ill, worried they might tell Social Services about the echoing rooms and cold walls.
And then there was my sister-in-lawthe golden girl of her family. My husbands parents gave up their quaint semi in Canterbury and retired to the countryside, just so she and her boyfriend could have some privacy in the city flat. Even though the new commute left them tired and annoyed, theyd return every Sunday, arms weighed down with stews and pies, filling her fridge and her cupboards before taking the last train home through the foggy fields.
Once, like a dreamer in a fishbowl, I plucked up the courage to ask my mother why things were this waywhy everything fell in my brothers lap while I was left with rainwater leaking through the roof and endless brown envelopes from the council. She replied sharply, as if snapping a thread: we never asked for help. As if that alone explained everythingthe loaves handed to one, the stones left for another. It left me tangled in long threads of resentment, unable to shake them off, even when the birds sang or the bells chimed in the distant village.
In the end, the unfairness heaped by our parentsthe endless generosity towards my younger brother, the cold shoulder turned to mebecame a quiet ache stitched into each day. Even now, its difficult to make sense of how the two of us, born of the same roof, could find ourselves offered such different weights to carry, and wondering, in this endless, spiralling daydream, why some doors open at the merest touch while others wont budge no matter how hard you knock.
