What It's Like to Grow Up as the "Normal" Kid

At first glance my family and many others like it look completely "normal." Of course normal is a very relative term and means something different to every person. But when you take a closer look you can see the differences from most people’s definition of the word. I grew up as the older sister of a sibling with autism. And while I got to grow up as the "normal" one, I did not grow up without feeling the effects of it.

Sadly growing up as the normal one means you get the short end of the stick at home 9 times out of 10. Your family only has so many hours in the day and your sibling needs them a lot more then you do. A lot of my earliest memories are of doctors' appointments and specialists coming to my house to help my brother. A lot of my childhood that wasn’t spent like that was spent with my grandmother. I can vividly remember spending almost every weekend with her and during those weekends were the only times I felt like a regular kid and not confined in the box that was autism.

When you grow up like this it can cause you to have a lot of self-esteem issues. You go through your young years with an internal struggle of what kind of kid you have to be and it causes you to have to grow up faster than you would have otherwise. You watch your sibling struggle so much that you begin to internalize your own struggles so you don’t burden people. You realize that your struggles are not as bad as others so you feel the need to deal with these things on your own. You feel the need to constantly be perfect so you don’t cause any more stress to your parents. It causes you to nitpick everything and tear yourself down.

You grow up in a world where people think it’s funny to call people retarded or other words like that which causes you anger. It causes an anger that you feel at such a young age that you don’t even truly understand. These people wouldn’t make these jokes if they knew what it was like or if they experienced it themselves. From a young age you have to realize the hate and malice that surge though the world you were born into and have to come to grips with the fact that you can’t change it.

You grow up watching your sibling get ostracized by society and picked on by their peers. You come to realize that not only does this treatment come from other kids. You have to watch adults look at your sibling and your family with a side eye and you hear all the things they say. You hear all the whispers from people about your sibling’s behavior and all the mean names and terms they use for them. And that causes you to have a lot of resentment towards the world. It’s not fair that you don’t get to grow up with a normal family while these people take their normalcy for granted. They turn up their noses to you instead of showing compassion and understanding.

It takes a long time but eventually you realize that being normal isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Every single family has its struggles and they make the family stronger. You learn to love the quirks that come with having a “special” sibling. And you learn to forgive the world and learn that you can change it by putting in more love then other people showed you. You realize that you wouldn’t want your family any other way and your adversities make you who you are. And that you love your life just the way it is.