My Stepbrother

I also want to talk about something else that happened this summer: My stepbrother was deployed to Iraq.

I should mention that it was just my older sister and I that lived with our mother and stepfather growing up. Our two older stepbrothers lived with their mother in Sandy and visited us regularly on weekends. They would often go on family trips with us and even joined us a few times for Christmas and Thanksgiving in Idaho. They also appeared with us in family pictures. They were truly part of the family, though it took me a long time to internalize that fact. For the longest time as a kid, when people would ask me how many siblings I had, I would answer that I had one older sister.

That changed somewhere down the road, probably when my oldest niece was born. By that time, both of my stepbrothers were out on their own and still visited us on a regular basis. Shortly after Tacy was born, Trevor visited us at our house in South Jordan and said, "I came to see my niece." Now I don't think that was the only reason he had come, but the fact that he said that really struck a chord in my 16-year-old self. She truly was his niece. Despite living several miles away from us while growing up, he and Kevin had truly established themselves as integral parts of our family. I can still recall those times in the car when the radio would be playing oldies and we would all start clapping and swaying in our seats to the Four Seasons. We would often talk about creating a family group like the Jackson 5. I remember how, when they came to visit on weekends, my bedroom would usually be the social scene, and we would record talk shows on my tape recorder with Trevor as the host. Then there were the times when I would "help" Trevor mow the monstrous double-lawn in our backyard. This consisted of me standing right in front of the lawnmower with my tiny hands (tinier than they are today) weakly gripping the handle, while he would stand behind me with his much stronger arms on either side of me firmly gripping the handle and do the actual mowing. I eventually inherited that job.

Just now, as I write this, I particularly remember when Rochelle and I were fighting over who got to sit in the back seat of our minivan as we were preparing to go to dinner. For some reason, the back seat of that vehicle was coveted much more than the middle seat, probably because the seats felt just like the front seat--molded to complement your backside and therefore somewhat more comfortable than the middle seat. Anyway, Trevor rose to my defense and lectured Rochelle about being fair and letting me have a turn. Mind you, he's 5 1/2 years older than I and 3 1/2 years older than she, so he spoke with unspoken authority, and he was using it to defend the youngest, and at the time the most defenseless, member of our family--me! That is what family is.

And yet, once I got into high school, college, the mission, and then college again, my stepbrothers and I drifted apart a bit. Sure we still saw each other frequently, but we were doing our own thing. It wasn't until I was in graduate school that we began communicating beyond a superficial level. This was because Trevor had since married Denise, with whom I eventually bonded over our love for the Denver Broncos and anybody that played the Raiders. She also isn't bad at word games like Scrabble and Quiddler. This resulted in me getting to know Trevor again as well, and we soon bonded over the TV show "Scrubs." In fact, shortly after leaving for Boston, I added him as a friend on Facebook, and when he accepted, I posted on his Wall and teased him with a variation of a Scrubs quote that he totally got. He posted back and conceded that he was impressed with my quip--that never happened before! He was so impressed that he even shared it with Denise, who subsequently continued with the line following that quote. "Wow!" I thought, "My stepbrother likes me!"

But all that doesn't quite amount to the sense of admiration I unexpectedly felt when Trevor was deployed back in July. Honestly, I didn't think it would affect me that much. True, I was raised around patriots--including a grandfather who fought as a marine in WWII, several uncles who served in Vietnam, and a stepfather who recently retired from the Utah National Guard--so I understand what it means to serve your country. One of the reasons I wanted to work for a defense contractor is because, due to my medical record, it is the closest I will ever get to serving in the military. But I did not expect to look at Trevor any differently. It was as if a light bulb had suddenly turned on in my head, and I realized, "This is huge! This is my oldest sibling, and he is leaving his family to defend the freedom of complete strangers!" You don't have to be religious to know that such a sacrifice is a defining characteristic of charity and pure love.

So with that said, I am proud to call him my stepbrother. I know I said on Facebook recently that I might drop the 'step' and call him my brother, but that may take time. Old habits die hard, I guess. But whatever I call him, he is in fact a part of my family and life that I truly respect and appreciate...even if I did call him Shirley in my last post on his Wall.