Today isn't Christmas
It's my brother's birthday.
That's how I've viewed Christmas ever since I learned of his existence over a decade ago. It was unexpected; my adoptive parents had a "feeling" (they knew but never dared to broach the subject) that I was my birth mother's second child, and I thought that was all. So, I was shocked to learn that I have a younger half-brother, too.
Of course, the 25th of December is virtually meaningless in Russia, something that hadn't dawned on me until my early twenties. But I don't care, I still tell people that his birthday is on Christmas. Or maybe Christmas is on his birthday.
Even though we don't share the same father, my brother occupies my headspace just as much as my fully biological sister, whom I met this year. Unfortunately, he could not join her on the trip to Kazakhstan.
He and I started texting only this May. I was warned that he's very, very shy.
He's so bashful that you'd think he's turning 16 instead of 26. We've barely exchanged any messages this year, but I've clung to each one. I saved the video clips of him waving to me because he's too shy to say much to me. I reread snippets of our written correspondences that seem to expire beyond three days yet don't offend me because he's my brother and I imagine how weird it must be for him. He was just a young teenager when he learned that he had not one sister but two. I don't know how I would react to that if I were him.
We don't look super alike, but that only makes me more excited to look at photos of him that I saved on my phone. It's like a challenge to find similarities, which I have eventually found. He looks so much more like his father, my sister repeats. My sister and brother have sometimes been mistaken for a couple in public. I show photos of him to my friends and ask if they think we look similar at all.
Reading the full names of my sister and brother for the first time all those years ago is something that still haunts me. All my life I've been desperate to meet them, to know and live vicariously through them. More so than my birth mother, I must admit.
Sometimes I think about how funny it is that I'm the misfit. The unlucky middle child who had to go away, banished from everyone's memory until our mother confessed. Like my existence deserved a long time-out. Sure, it's unsurprising that a young mother who could hardly afford to keep one child had to surrender the second (me). But then she and my sister's stepfather had my brother. It's hard not to take that personally sometimes. I try not to, especially because his father said he would have been so willing to raise me had he known of me.
Our mother doesn't know why he's so shy, especially because he's so social and extroverted. Maybe it's because he has a different father, she suggests. I don't ask him because I don't want him to feel bad.
I don't ask if it's because of me. I was not second best but third worst. I wonder if he (and my sister) identifies as the kept one and doesn't know how to sit with that.
I don't mind that he's not a big texter given how much my sister and I write to each other. He insists that he'll stop being shy once we eventually meet. For now, he cannot find the words.
I hope we see each other next year, he semi-recently wrote to me.
I'm not optimistic about that.
I wish I could meet my brother and spend his birthday with him. That would be the best Christmas gift.