I Always Hated My Brother—Until I Found His Essay

Turns Out I Knew Him My Whole Life, But He Was Still A Complete Stranger

My brother was always different—but none of us understood why.

He sucked his finger well into his teens.

He sang terrible falsetto opera to annoy me.

And he treated me like dirt.

The finger-sucking habit seems incredulous when I look back and think about it.

He never explained why he liked to do it. But he wanted to do it. And nobody could make him stop. You couldn’t argue with him. You couldn’t reason with him. You couldn’t even bribe him.

My father hated it. “You’re STILL sucking your finger?”

He’d say most incredulously.

“I can’t believe you’re still doing that.”

My aunts would stop on the weekend, and someone would let slip that my brother still sucked his finger.

A dead silence would drop, and Aunty Judy would ask, feeling such confusion and exasperation, “Why is he STILL sucking his finger?”

He might laugh it off -- or not answer at all.

In St. Lucia, there was always the St. Lucian way of handling things. There was a plant-based remedy for absolutely everything, from weaning your child off…