There is something so absolutely remarkable about the inner workings of a family. This hit me yesterday, as I sat with my 12-year-old niece enjoying parody via YouTube. We laughed out loud for a good solid five minutes and then I razzed her about her latest orchestra-class crush. And I thought to myself "I'm so glad to see you! I'm so glad to be with you!"
Only in families do you cheerfully and eagerly delight in the budding teenagers around you, the idiosycracies of your Mother, and the consistently bossy and slightly innapropriate social skills of your sister-in-law (Ok, fine, that one was me...We are all working on something, right?).
This singular phenomenon is no more striking to me than when it comes to my brothers and my brothers-in-law. I LOVE them. Nowhere under heaven does a woman have quite the same relationship with a man as she does with her brothers--a situation where there is complete freedom to be yourself, and not worry so much about complicated man/woman communication skills, flirting, etc. You are absolutely free to love all the great and interesting and funny things about them and let their wives worry about the rest.
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I've been thinking more about brothers lately because this year for Christmas my mother assigned each of us to write a letter of appreciation and admiration for another sibling. I was assigned to Ben Crowder--the brilliant man who married my little sister just over one year ago--an easy task.
Ben is brilliant. He is endlessly informed and hillariously idiosyncratic, not to mention completely easy to be around. If nothing else, I should just love him for the fact that he consistently submits to the endless harassing from my children to play. (And they crawl all over the poor man.)
But he is much more than that to me.
Ben is a seeker of knowledge. And in this he has completely captured my sisterly heart. I LOVE this about him, because it challenges and opens my own mind. He is interested in things and, therefore is interesting himself. I follow him on twitter and, throughout the course of one day his tweets can run from current events and favorite fonts to his latest drawing and online software rumors. (My twitter thoughts, on the other hand, generally surround laundry and toddlers.) When I talk to him in person, he often pulls out his phone and researches what we are talking about, then adds more to the conversation (I know that sounds really sort-of freaky, but if you think about it, it is actually really cool.) He doesn't talk to people just to be nice but, instead, learns from everyone and everything.
He doesn't really care a whole lot about sports.
He is very kind to my little sister.
He loves cilantro.
He makes crazy pictures on photo booth.
He plays the piano.
He loves good literature.
He can't truly see anything without glasses.
But with all of these, he is still very much a man.
And my life is much fuller because he is my brother.
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