Growing Up -- Life an Experiment

I was a kid once. I would play on the playground and ride my boke, and sometimes I would fall down. I would run home to my parents who knew exactly how to fix me up and make me feel better. I would play softball and have slumber parties. I did my homework, and sometimes I would make bad grades, and i would get in trouble. My parents knew exactly how to punish me.
My brother came along, and he made an excited dog seem mellow with his energy. He could play and play for hours, and his eyes shined with passion for living life. It was such a beautiful thing. If anyone knew best, he knew just how to get into trouble. He had it down to an art. Once, he made fun of a little boy on his baseball team, and he would get in trouble with my mom. We would laugh and trust that he would learn from his mistake. He ran around with his friends all day, running down to the park to play on the playground. He would stay out too long, until the sun had already said goodbye for the day. my dad and my mom would go out to look for him, and I would sit at home with my heart beating so fast that I couldn't do anything or even think about doing anything else. One time I even cried.
When they pulled into the driveway, I was always there looking out the window. My eyes went straight to the back seat, and he was always there. My parents would punish him. He would be grounded for a week or two, and this would keep him from pulling things like this for a while.
He kept growing, as we all do, but lacked in maturity growth. And lacked in the ability to learn from his mistakes, something that comes with growth for the most of us.
My brother, he kept getting into trouble. For saying a bad word at school, for drawing on a kid's shirt, for hitting another little boy. Each time I knew just what to expect. The yelling would get louder and the punishments would get worst.
My little brother, one would think he thrived off of being punished and yelled at. The punishments would work for a while, but he was clearly not learning from his mistakes. My brother Justin, he has a good heart. I know that it is in there somewhere. He has just been piling things on top of it since the day that his eyes shined with passion.
He kept getting worse, but no one knew ehy. He had all of the right things at his geer. A family who loves him, an smart mind, a nice place to live, to go to school, food at his disposal, the latest gaming sysyem. Anything a boy could ask for.

But my birthday came, and I got a phone call from my mom telling met hat Justin had been expelled from school.

I didn't know what to do. All I wanted to do was curl up in a ball and cry because I could only anticipate what kind of living hell would be in my house on that night of my 17th birthday. I couldn't do anything, and I felt so sorry for my parents to have to deal with this, but I had all the trust in the world that they could. After all, they always knew what to do when we made bad grades in school or when he hit another kid.

But this time they didn't.
He has been spiriling out of control, digging deeper and deeper into trouble, certainly further than any of us have gone and further than any of us expected him to go.
Other kids mess up too, we do realize, but other kids learn from their mistakes. Other kids get into trouble too, it's a part of growing up. But it's not the ordinary case to keep getting into trouble to a point when you have driven your own family into a wall.
Your own family.

We always laughed at the silly things he would do. He is little, we would tell ourselves. He is still growing and still maturing. But we stopped laughing as time progressed. We stopped laughing and he stopped caring and we started to wonder where this black spiral would spit us out. None of us knew and none of us could control it. None of us that cared.

As I have grouwn up and matured I have come to realize that this is the first time living for all of us. We learn with experience, but who has done this before? I looked up to my parents to the solution for everything. To fix my scraped knees, to know what punishment would and would not work on myself and on my brother. But as well fall with my brother I realize that they've never been here or done this before. They don't always have the answer to everything.

At times, certainly ones like there, they know just as much as I do. They are just as scared as I am. It's not always a good feeling when your protectors are scared of the same thing that you are. It's a scary feeling because now I realize that relatively soon I will be the one that people look to for answers. But I haven't done this before.

We live, and we learn, but I haven't lived before and we don't have much time to learn.

As a kid, I always thought that there was someone who had all of the answers to life, all of the tips on how to do it right. Whether it was my parents, or someone else. But I have come to see that we are all living in on experiment and the ones who know aren't here to share their secrets.

We are left here to gifgure things out on our own. No one knows the answers, not even the parents that knew everything when I was growing up.