Things we love about Danny #23 - He’s not that bad of a brother

Oh okay fine, if anybody tells him I said this I will DENY it but as it turns out Danny is a really good brother.

It’s no secret that Danny made my childhood…oh how to put this nicely… EXTREMELY DIFFICULT. When my oldest daughter shocked me by taking her first steps at 9 months old I called my mom to ask her if I was an early walker too. She said no, not really, but that it wasn’t my fault because every time I tried to stand up Danny knocked me down. If I had to explain my childhood on the front of a T-shirt I might use that very phrase. And no, it wasn’t really that bad, at least not all the time, but I’m the baby of the family and we’re known to be rather dramatic.

The thing is that now, today, if I needed help with anything at all I know that I could count on Danny. And he would expect nothing in return. Seriously, I think if I were halfway across the country and my car broke down in the middle of nowhere, Danny would show up about 15 minutes later… cuz he drives really, really fast… find a way to fix the car, act like it was no big deal and jump right back in his car and be on his way.

Truth be told, even when we were kids there were glimpses of the good guy that lurked inside. Every now and then after endless rounds of torture, Danny would say or do something so completely sweet and vulnerable that it would almost make me feel guilty that just moments before I’d been praying he’d get run over by a bus.

He burned the toes off of my Barbies, mercilessly hurled Hot Wheel tracks at me like they were swords until I was covered in bruises, sent me plunging off the handle bars of his bike into those horrible prickly juniper bushes repeatedly. But all of this makes the fact that he’s turned out to be such a good brother all the more poignant. It still surprises me on a somewhat regular basis because I just didn’t see it coming. But again, don’t go telling him that, because as far as he knows I’m still really ticked off about those burned Barbie toes.