For those of you who don't know our family situation (which shall be explained later in this entry), my brother Mark is 10 years younger than me. You wouldn't expect that to make a difference in the knowledge we have and the experiences we had, but it did.

Oh my goodness, it did.

The latest evidence of this? Mark has never heard the term (and I apologize for the political incorrectness) "Indian giver."

When we were kids, we would call anyone who gave us something and then wanted it back again (as children are wont to do) "Indian givers." Why this is so, I'm not quite sure, because it really ought to be called "white man givers," since the white man kept giving Native Americans pieces of land and then taking them back.

But I digress.

Mark kept busting out laughing about every ten minutes with his new knowledge of "Indian giver." Now he wants me to come up with other terms he's never heard.

What also gets me is when I have to explain cultural references. By the time Mark was a self-aware child, Germany was unified once again. He's been watching the marathon of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" on Nick at Nite all week, and they mentioned East Germany one night. There was another reference that was mentioned in one episode that I had to explain, only I don't remember it now.

You wouldn't think ten years would make such a difference.

My family history gets rather complicated. So grab a Coke or a coffee, put your feet up, and settle in for a good long story.

My father and my mother were married in September of 1971. My mother was 19, my dad was 25. Three years later my mother gave birth to my sister Michele, and I arrived in 1979. In 1981, my mother left my father and us kids, and a divorce followed not long afterward.

My mother then got custody of us, which she retained until 1985. In June of 1985, my father married my stepmother Marty, whom I normally refer to as "my mom." I like to make things confusing. They had met two years previously at the Navy Ball. Both my stepmom and my father were officers in the Navy. Just one month after getting married, my sister and I descended upon my dad and my poor stepmom, at the respective ages of 10 and 6. Of course, it was a difficult adjustment for us all, especially since my stepmom hadn't really planned on getting married at all.

One thing she always wanted to do, and why she joined the Navy in the first place, was adopt a child. After it was realized that my father and she weren't going to have a biological child, they began to put that plan into motion. In December of 1988, my brother Mark was born to a single mother of Mayan descent in Guatemala, and immediately put up for adoption. My parents traveled to Guatemala in May of 1989 and brought him home.

Now there were three kids in the house. That same summer, we moved from northern Virginia to Illinois, where my parents had gotten stationed. Eventually my sister decided it was better for her to go back to our real mother, so she moved back to Virginia just before her senior year of high school. The next summer she too joined the Navy, where she met her husband Ben.

So now it was just Mark and me in the house, and we moved to Nebraska for yet another change in duty station. Two years later, my father retired from the Navy and we moved back to northern Virginia, where Mark started kindergarten and I graduated high school.

What makes our family so weird is the experiences of all three of us kids are so vastly different. My sister remembers my father and mother being married; I don't. My sister remembers living with my mother after the divorce; I have only scattered, foggy memories. My sister spent most of her childhood in Virginia; I spent five years in Illinois and Nebraska. My sister never lived in Nebraska. My brother doesn't remember living with my sister. My brother spent nearly all of his public school education in the same school district, and would have done so except for some extenuating circumstances which required him to attend a different school; my sister and I went to school in several school systems spread over a few states. My brother's parents have been married nearly 22 years; my sister and I have divorced parents. There were some situations where I was the youngest child (any time we spent time with our real mom), but most of the time I felt like the oldest child since it was just Mark and me at home with my dad. Sometimes it felt more like I was an only child because of the vast age difference between Mark and me.

Mark and I are really close, which is why I am so glad he was able to come visit me. Of course, my sister and I are too; we're sisters, after all! But sometimes kids that are of a different gender aren't necessarily very close, especially considering the age difference.

What made it easy to be so close to him was his sweetness. I know he sort of looks like a tough gangsta in some of his photos, but he really has a soft spot in his heart for me. He's always tried to make me feel better when I'm down. When I found out that Kurt was extended, the very first thing Mark did was to give me the biggest hug he could. I'm so glad he was here when I got the news.

So that's our family. It takes all kinds to make a family, I know. I'm just glad I have such a good one!