MUCOLYTIC

(This is the life story of my friend D.)

My two kid brothers have this nasty habit of raising their voice on me whenever I raise mine on them, sometimes when I am disgusted of something they did that’s distasteful. I’m beginning to notice it has become a pattern. They’d call me ‘big boss,’ which I take to be a term of endearment, but whenever I act like I was indeed the big boss around the house, they in turn act like they’re on the same level as me on the organizational chart. Worse, they act like I’m accountable to them.

It’s crazy I can’t figure it out. We never grew up with maids but we constantly had poorer relations living with us, which meant we never run out of ‘househelps’ growing up. The difference is we never imposed and our relatives always volunteered anyway. The difference is they were treated as members of the family. The thing is, my brothers and I never grew up as royalty so I couldn’t trace where that particularly bratty behavior was coming from.

If I feel I want to be extra princely around my fiefdom, I have this habit of raising both of my hairy legs on the couch as I watch the news. And, as if on cue, my brothers would always follow suit. It wouldn’t be too much of a fuss if they didn’t raise their legs a little bit higher than I do.

If I barked at someone “Clean up this mess! Now!”, he’d be sure to snarl back like Hitler, “Later!”

If I’d leave specific instructions for the house, I’ve learned it better to annotate with the threat “Do it, or else I wouldn’t pay your cell phone bill!!” or I’d be sure to get no response at all.

Oftentimes I feel like a dorky mongrel – all bark and no bite. Perhaps I need to make sure I constantly remind them I call the shots around here. But whenever I act tough, they’d call my bluff. I swear by the art of bluffing but they have mastered the art of long before I did.

My pals know I can be such a marshmallow-hearted sucker, so my monologues of terrorist attacks they’d end up using against me. They compete with me for the 100-meter dash for the Sunday morning paper when the newspaperman arrives. They use my favorite coffee mug, a beige Tupperware mug I’ve inherited from a colleague at work when she left They get the best portions of the chicken for dinner.

My brothers and I live far away from our parents so we’re left pretty much to our own respective devices. This means I had to do the job of leading and managing the household of college grownups, or the weird arrangement that passes for it. I never thought I could still live with my parents at my age, but I never thought I would one day have kids under my wings who are not my own!

Worse, this also means my brothers and I couldn’t be friends. Our relationship would be like business-labor relation – there’s automatic hostility. You know what they say: It comes with the territory. I am being counted on as responsible. I should act like the big brother and if I fouled up in my job, it could be called mismanagement. And if I in the slightest bit decided to be physical, it might be construed as sexual harassment. I don’t know. Sometimes, I question God about my fate.

It’s really crazy. On Sundays, when sloth and gluttony become virtues, it is my favored routine to sleep the day off, vege it out in front of rented videos or bum around the house. What do you know, my subalterns have apparently heard of the maxim “Follow the leader” without my knowledge and prior approval! So on Sundays it shouldn’t be a surprise to find them sleeping off the whole day and bumming around the house, sometimes inspecting whether I was watching something above PG-13, as though on the lookout for some sex scene, which pisses me off because they make me feel like an agent of porn – never mind that the laundry has piled up to the ceiling, and the dirty dishes are running around one after the other. The least I expect my subalterns to do is dust off the floor, but even this task needs some constant nagging. It seems that because I didn’t do it myself, they wouldn’t either.

Maybe I should be faulted for my failure to preach the value of initiative, but I have this feeling they’d just burp on it and ask for a definition. Maybe I should stop acting like the boss and start acting like the maid? I wonder if they’d follow suit.

Too bad there are only two house chores I like doing: washing my own dishes and ironing my own clothes. When I look at it, it’s I who appear to be the problem: I am the original spoiled brat. I am a bad role model/jerk.