Family.

I'm not quite sure how to interpret this weeks Sunday Scribblings prompt: Miscellaneous. For starters, I can hardly spell it. So, I've decided to write about my family, not my new immediate family but the family I grew up knowing.. and not knowing.

My parents had been married for almost two years when I was born. My Mum was a microbiologist and qualified high school teacher. My Father was a carpenter by trade but worked as a salesman for timber companies. After my arrival my Mother chose not to return to work rather to be a full time Mum. She was an avid photographer, there are fifteen photo albums of my first few years of life. Four days before my third birthday, mum gave birth to a healthy baby boy. He became the light of my little life, my Grandmother has repeatedly told me the story of the first time she saw him at hospital. As she entered the room I took her had and led her to the sleeping blue bundle. This is Aaron I said, he is my brother and I am his sister!

When my Father was nineteen years old he married a girl who was pregnant with his child. They married in November and Dad had left by the following February, leaving the young woman alone with baby Justin for the next eighteen years. Justin & Dad made contact and kept in touch after his eighteenth birthday, when I was born, people who saw Justin holding me assumed I was his daughter, we were so alike. Shortly before Justin's twenty first birthday and my first he passed away. His death is still shrouded in secrecy for me and I do not know the full details. The main idea I got was he had been drinking and took sleeping pills to end the night, this combination had killed him and stolen a young life, I have no memory of Justin.

Throughout the course of my early childhood my parents started their own small business which is now a multimillion dollar company. In the beginning Mum worked from home doing book-keeping and Dad travelled interstate often to make big sales. As the company expanded they purchased land, built a warehouse and employed other family members. They both still work together running this company.

I loved my brother, more then anything really. As a little boy he was very clingy and couldn't bear to be away from Mum. When he started school I felt an immense need to protect him and would enlist my older friends to fend off five and six year olds. He spent many nights sleeping on the floor in my bedroom due to his fear of the dark and many nights afterwards with our family dog curled up beside him in his own room. Although I loved him dearly he was annoying, ridiculously, terribly annoying. Over my birthday weekend Dad would take him and some friends away so "the girls" could spend time celebrating. These days, we have nothing in common and we very rarely speak. I miss him.

When I was sixteen my parents, after many unhappy years, separated and eventually divorced. Aaron and I stayed with Mum and while all looked good, my world gradually fell apart. I feel this is the time my relationship with Dad went downhill, I dropped out of school, broke up with my boyfriend and was just plain miserable. I then had the added stress of feeling compelled to protect Aaron from the emotion of it all. One night he came to me and asked if the divorce was his fault, I was shattered. The thought of his face that night still causes tears to well in my eyes.

During the divorce I found out alot of "secrets". It came to light that I also had two other brothers, born not too long after Justin, neither of which my Dad kept contact with. To this day I still have had no success in finding these men who would be in their late thirties now. It's been almost a year since I spoke to my father and as I said before Aaron and I haven't spoken in months. The relationship I have with Mum remains one of the closest, most important and most grounding relationships in my life.

Once upon a time we were a family unit, we were one and I felt we had a loving, happy household. Now we are just a miscellaneous group of people bound together only by past and fleeting memories of the way it used to be.