Catching Up

My brother and I talk to each other, for once

Story & photos by Kumiko Juker

Standing face to face, my brother and I are funhouse mirror reflections of each other. He’s six years younger than me, but six inches taller and willowy where I’m stout.

My brother’s name is Tada. He was born when my family lived in Bellingham. Bellingham has been a near-sacred place to me since we left when I was 11 and he was 5. I lived my childhood here. I thought he saw his childhood in the same way. Talking to him shatters this illusion.

“I have no nostalgia for living in Bellingham and being a very young child,” he said.

My memories of my brother in Bellingham are clear. He’s lying on the carpet and putting his toes in his mouth; 7-year-old me is disturbed, imagining the salty taste. He’s sitting proudly next to a broken baby-proof lock surrounded by hundreds of scattered Cheerios.

“I barely remember anything,” he said.

When I decided to write about my brother, I knew we’d need to talk. Sitting there with my phone in my hand though, the thought of reaching out to Tada to ask for a favor made my fingertips clammy. I typed and deleted message after message before impulsively scrolling to the top of our text thread.

“This is Tada I got a new phone because my old one broke,” he messaged on Dec. 6, 2022. I replied with a thumbs-up emoji.

“Happy birthday!! I hope it’s good,” I messaged on Jan. 4, 2023. He thanked me.

“Mom is driving,” he texted on Sept. 3, 2023. I didn’t respond.

“Happy birthday!” I messaged on Jan. 4, 2024. He thanked me.

I used to fantasize about becoming a cool older sister Tada could talk to about crushes and teenage angst. When he became a teenager and nothing changed, I assumed this was the extent of our relationship.

“It’s sort of like growing up with somebody, except you don’t really know who they are,” Tada said clinically, as if teaching a class on sibling dynamics. “It’s not exactly a bad feeling, but I’d say it’s sort of awkward.”

I’m still watching him grow up. Our birthdays are six years and 10 days apart. I can’t wrap my head around the fact that he just turned 15. He’s unfazed by how old he is, but he laughed when I mentioned that I’m 21.

“I always remember you as being like — a teenager,” he said slowly.

Our age gap is uncommon. The number of years between sibling births has increased since the 1970s, but the average birth spacing in 2010 through 2017 was still around four years, according to a 2020 study by Christine R. Schwartz, Catherine Doren and Anita Li.

I’ve felt our age difference many times. I studied Japanese and scribbled stories while he took his first steps. I got my driver’s license while he was learning multiplication.

We’re in Japan and he’s 6 in his hazy first memory. His head is on our mom’s lap.

I remember the rest of the trip. Our grandfather picked us up from the airport. My motion-sickness-prone brother and I stunk of vomit and stale air, but we perked up after a warm meal, stumbling through conversation in our second language. We went to parks and shops, and our grandfather always let us have that one extra snack. That was the last time we saw him.

“It’s a weird feeling,” Tada said. “[He was] gone before I really could think about it and understand that [he] existed.”

Common ground is hard to find. It’s missing even in the places I was sure it would be. Both of us feeling the distance between us is something I never considered.

“There’s so much that . . . already happened in those six years that I wasn’t there,” he said. “I feel like I’m catching up in experiences.”

I’ll have finished college before he even starts high school. I don’t know what kept me from reaching him when I’m the one setting the pace.

One memory stands out from our childhood. As he began exploring on shaky legs, I started to fear him coming into my room and ruining my things. Only one deterrent was sure to work. With crooked limbs and teeth so huge they couldn’t fit in its mouth, my door was guarded by its faithful protector: a foot-tall plush of Donkey from Shrek.

“Bro,” he said, breaking up his measured responses as his eyes lit up with recognition. “It was so creepy. It was so creepy.”

Tada’s hair is double the length of mine and he excels in STEM classes where I always trudged along. Yet we talk about the Venn diagram overlap of our memory: the stupid Donkey plush, our grandpa’s funeral altar, the car I learned to drive in.

We also share unspoken things: our mom’s pin-straight hair, our dad’s ear for music and our incessant need to argue. He tells me about robotics, and I tell him about magazine writing. Later, I write a text thanking him, and I send it without a second thought.