Being the ELDEST

**Yes, Grammar Nazis, there are wrong grammars. Wrote this 5 years ago. Haha!

A common family usually consists of a father, mother and siblings. But my family is not a common family. You can barely call it a family because it's incomplete -- a broken one. I have my parents, of course, but unfortunately, my father left us for his first family. Yes, we're just a second family considering the women he married but I'm his 8th eldest.

Being a single parent with two siblings was never easy to my mother -- considering that she's the eldest among eight. And being the eldest in the family was never easy to me, too. Since I'm a child, my mother have been working as an office girl. She usuallly left home in the morning leaving me to my great grandmother and she will eventually be at home during the night due to the distance of our home to her office. Obviously, she is not always around during my younger years and upto now. Eventhough we're at the same house, we barely see and talk with each other.

I learned to be on my own at an early age. I got used to be alone minding my own business and not asking help from her. Why? Because whenever I do, she usually sends me off to her brothers and sisters because she's busy and/or tired. I usually do my homeworkds and projects on my own and just asks financial assistance from my mom. That's why when my brother grew up, i was quite bitter and jealous on how my mother treated him.

My brother is four years younger than me and my mother usually gives him special attention. When the time i was in high school, my brother is in his elementary days. And during those times, my mother usually asks me to guide and help my brother do his assignments. Actually, it was not really meant for guiding him becuase wheat my mother really wanted me to do was to answer my brother's entire assignments. Due to jealousy and bitterness, I always refuse to answer my brother's homeworkds. I always tell my mom that during my sibling's age, I was on my own and doing my assignments with no help of others until I can manage. But my mother kept telling me that I should understand my brother's situation and that I was way intelligent than him. Yet, I was never convince by what my mother usually says. In a way, it was also my own way of rebellion because she never show me such affection that she's giving to my brother.

For every little upto big things, I was always on the look out for what was my brother's wrongdoings and somethings that I should be jealous about. I was really childish and not growing up when it comes to my attitude towards my younger brother until I became a failure to my mother.

By third year high school, I got personal problems that affected my studies and I was sent off from my school, UST Pay High School. I was really scared back then and I couldn't tell my mother about what happened. But eventually, she found out about it and she got angry as expected. I thought I will never be back in school again until my own mother arranged my summer classes and my enrollment for the next school year.

Through what happened, I finally realized that I was and still being love by my mother in her own way. Not the same way with my brother but with the same depth. She just don't know how to show it to me and maybe because I was also blinded during those times by jealousy.

We're in good terms now and I still see and feel that she love me through continually understanding me about my every flaws and imperfections. I just need to open my eyes and be sensitive to feel.