What makes someone your brother? Is it the strength of your relationship? Is it their inherent supportiveness? Or is it biology?
Although all siblings (biological or adopted) always have a way of getting under our skin, when you've grown up with a particularly difficult sibling, even the smallest annoyances can set you off–that's because, regardless of your birthing order, the easy sibling is always the acting 'middle child'. Anyone with a challenging brother or sister automatically gets overlooked, forgotten, and ultimately cast aside because they're the 'easy one'. For families with biological children as well as adoptive children, sibling dynamics can become even foggier as the bloodlines blur and middle-childisms form.
The acting middle child in our next story had always hoped that his adoptive brothers would accept him as their true brother–considering they all grew up together from their early childhood–but even after nearly 3-decades, his adoptive brothers wouldn't see him as an equal, or even as a 'real' brother. Finally, after getting renounced from brotherhood, this man stood up for himself at a major cost to his delicate family dynamic.
