Being the Eldest Brother

This was not a position I ever saw myself occupying. I am the eldest of five kids, all boys. Of course at this point, as we range in age from 37-58, we are grown men, not really kids any longer.

Our father died in 1977 when I was 29 years of age. I was a failure in the eyes of both parents. My father had only kind of made his peace with my choice of occupations. I had become a teacher of meditation. He would have had me in the business world with him but in my rebellious phase, I drowned out his entreaties and though he would push me otherwise, my stepmother called his aggressiveness off. Even so, I knew he would have to bite his tongue when I would visit, and occasionally he would slip and I would be the recipient of a sharp-tongued, deprecating remark.

None of us really amounted to much meaning there are no doctors or lawyers in this family. And some of us have slogged through 30 years and still not found our way to good earnings

Somehow, at age 42 I pulled myself out of the twenty year nosedive I had been in and got my teaching credential. Thus began a journey from $26,000 per year to $65,000 per year over the next 12 years. Because I saw so clearly that my brothers were in the same boat I had been in, only quite far behind me, I took on, as my mission, the role of cheerleader and caretaker, to do what I could to help them not take as much time as I did to start earning a decent living.

My youngest brother, after blowing all of his savings on absolutely nothing, has finally come around. I've been his supporter, both emotionally and, when he has needed it, financially. This model of unconditional support has been helpful in his case. He is finally earning a living, and he keeps himself motivated and moving forward. One of my other blood brothers is just beginning to get to the same point and it looks like, somewhere in the next few weeks, he is going to allow me to start directing him to a more success oriented life.

What started out for me as a chore, the caretaking for my four brothers, has become a lifestyle of sorts, and by modeling the fact that if you work hard, and a lot, you can earn a living, is starting to rub off and I can see a light at the end of the tunnel.

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About the author

Ken Hassman is the owner of the back-of-book indexing service, Hassman Indexing Services, dedicated to providing high quality academic/scholarly indexing, medical indexing, trade book indexing, textbook indexing, encyclopedia indexing, journal indexing, and embedded indexing.

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