Mike And I

"Mike and I"

I decided to look into the relationship I have with my older brother Mike. Mike has always been a genuinely good person to most people he has encountered except for me growing up. Our relationship growing up through the years consisted of him poking fun at me and roughing me up. He was the bully of an older brother type. I can't say it was all him on the other hand, I know that I asked for a lot of the things that came my way. I was a typical younger brother that wanted to hang out with him and his friends and try an act cool. Which isn't too big of a deal except I never showed him the respect that comes with being older. We for some reason thought it was fun to call each other out on the dumb things that we would do. You know try to embarrass the other one. Which I'm sure it's a somewhat normal thing for brothers to do, but we just never grew out of that stage. We still jump on about every opportunity we come across to take a low shot at the other.

I sat and contemplated one day about Mike and my relationship as brothers. I realize not everyone gets along with family but it would be nice to have a decent conversation with my brother. So I started to think about what could I do to make this relationship with him be more loving and rewarding. I had a hard time to think of ways I could approach him with these changes without letting him in on what I was doing. So I decided to take a subtler type of approach. I was plain and simply just going to lie of all the jokes that I would normally poke at him. It seems simple enough but I'll have you know that its hard with this guy to make fun of him times. He makes way to easy. Anyway it took a little time before I even noticed a change at all. It was no significant change that's for sure but there was something different. He started to have a nicer attitude towards me. It sounds ridiculous I know, stop making fun of someone and they'll be kinder, yeah I get it but I had to start somewhere right.

Now it was time to take this project to the next level. I would start to just call him randomly to talk. Sounds easy enough again right. Well not with us, we have never been that big of talkers between each other. Normally the only conversation we would have is if one of us needed something from the other or we were rocking a side comment. Once again I couldn't notice much from doing this at first but slowly and surely we started to have more in depth and caring conversations. It started to feel like we really were brothers. I mean I have a younger brother who I get along with very well so this started to resemble the relationship my younger brother and I have.

I never thought that I was really going to see a change in our relationship, but I figured what could it hurt. After I attempted the first two changes and surprisingly enough saw positive results I decided it was time to try something else. I decided to do things for him. You know be a good brother and offer a helping hand. I thought I was going crazy I Scott Dwyer was really going to help my older brother Mike out, Wow. I knew at this point before I ever did lend a helping hand that we already made light years of progress. So I would go hang out with him and his fiancÐ"© for a day. We didn't always do something that big or great, you know maybe just watch a Hawkeye football or basketball game or maybe we would