Growing up, I thought my life was pretty normal. Mom, dad, my older brother, and then me. I was the youngest and the girl, so I was sort of spoiled.

Or at least what counted for spoiled in our house.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when things changed with my parents, but I was maybe five? My brother is two years older than me so he was around 7 or so. I still don’t know what caused it, but it started gradually.

My parents would get so mad at my brother for things he did wrong. I thought he was a bad kid back then, from how my parents talked about him and how he was always in trouble. They didn’t exactly treat me like a princess but compared to my brother, I was much better off.

Things just kept getting worse. My parents drank a lot and when they were drunk they were even meaner than when they were sober. Our house was always dirty, mom never cleaned. My clothes were rarely clean, but I had enough clothes that I could change every day and not be noticeably gross for a few weeks before mom finally did the laundry. My brother only got one pair of clothes and he had to wear them every day for weeks until mom did laundry, then she’d give them back to him without drying them.

I was lucky enough to have a mattress in my room. Something to sleep on with blankets and a few toys. My brother didn’t have anything. Just an empty room with the window covered in glued on tinfoil and a ceiling lamp with no light bulb. My dad put a latch lock on the outside of the door so they could lock him in there when he was “bad”.

When I was younger, I used to sneak food to my brother after our parents went to bed. They wouldn’t feed him anything if they locked him in his room. We weren’t allowed to play together or talk. I’d be sent to bed without dinner and he’d get hit and locked in the room if we broke those rules and got caught.

My parents never hit me. They yelled sometimes, used food as a punishment, but that was it. I don’t know why they hated my brother so much. After awhile I got so used to thinking of him as the other kid, the bad one, that I stopped trying to help him.

I don’t know why I was like that. At the time it seemed right. That was how my parents wanted me to treat him. But looking back it was my biggest regret. I can’t take that back as much as I want to.

It wasn’t until we were both taken away that I realized just how not normal my family had been. How horrible things had really been. I just didn’t know any better at the time.

It’s been almost fifteen years and it still haunts me. Was it a coin flip that made them choose to hate him instead of me? Why did they treat us so differently? And then there are the memories of when I had started treating him like shit because it earned my parents approval. Why did I even want their approval? It wasn’t worth it. It really wasn’t. I was such a dumb kid.

Every time someone tells me that I’m nice or a good person, I always think about my brother. About how I went from trying to sneak him food to calling him horrible names because it made my parents laugh. Good people don’t do that.

I’ve thought about trying to find him again. We were separated and barely saw each other in foster care. A part of me just wants to tell him I’m sorry, but the other part of me is afraid to put myself out there like that. He’s 29 now. Probably has a life, hopefully a good one. He doesn’t need me to dig up old shitty memories.

I just wish he knew how sorry I was.