How I Pretty Much Raised My Brother

By Alina Adams 

I had my oldest son a few months before I turned 30. Not young in the majority of the world. Not even particularly young in the United States. On the Upper West Side of New York, however, when I asked my doctor if, at 36, I was too old to think about having a third child, he told me, “Most of my patients your age are still thinking about thinking about having their first baby.”

The thing is, even though I gave birth to my first child in 1999, I’d already been raising one for about two decades prior to that. My brother.

Eight years younger than me, he was born six months after my family immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union. My parents had a lot to do, what with the whole settling in another country, learning English, looking for a job, trying to survive thing. So my brother became my responsibility. I took him for walks around the block in his baby carriage. I took him to the bathroom. On his first day of preschool, I stayed with him in the classroom to help him adjust. I taught him to tie his shoes. I bought him his first baseball glove because I knew he’d need it to fit in with the other, American boys at kindergarten. I regularly went to his parent/teacher conferences (most were cool with it; but one flat out refused to speak to me, even though I tried to explain I’d been doing this for years now. I was 12). And when, down the line, he became a competitive ice skater, I drove him to practice at dawn and dealt with his coaches and was his official chaperone at out-of-town competitions.

To me, it seemed normal. Most of the kids I grew up around, also Soviet immigrants with younger siblings born in the US, understood that the answer to “Am I my brother’s keeper?” was “Yes, you are. So anything he does wrong is your fault.”

To this day, when someone compliments my mother about my brother, her response is, “Tell Alina. He’s her child.”

Conversely, when my mother wants to know what my brother is thinking, she doesn’t ask him. She asks me.
The practice has a name, apparently. I learned it in The Sibling Effect, the book I reviewed here last summer. It’s called alloparenting, and it’s rather common around the world. Except in the West.

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