My Brother is Smarter Than Me

My Brother is Smarter Than Me

When I was a kid my parents had my only brother John and I take an IQ test. They got the results but didn’t tell us what we got. They told us, “You guys are both bright and don’t need to know your scores to know you’re smart.” I secretly thought, “That’s nice of them to not tell John the scores, they probably didn’t want him to feel bad comparing his score to mine.”

The older I’ve gotten the more and more I’ve been convinced that the situation was reversed. You see, my brother is definitely way smarter than me.

Don’t worry, I’m not down on how smart I am. I think I’m pretty intelligent and can hold my own in an academic conversation. I’m a reader and writer. This really isn’t about that. It’s about my brother. No matter what anyone says, when their sibling does something better or earlier than them it hits something deep, especially a younger sibling. I’m still surprised at how adamant my wife was that she not only get married but also have kids before her younger sister did.

Now, for years I was better than my brother at everything. It wasn’t hard, being 5 years older. I beat him at every board game we played. I had more friends. I was going out on dates when he was playing with his G.I. Joes. I drove him to school. I could beat him at every single sport we played. But somewhere along the line I started to realize that he was smart. When he memorized all the flags of the world out of the encyclopedia for fun we started to call him “Royal Smart Person.” When he could rattle off the rank order of all 4 armed forces I called him a nerd. When he created an intricate world with maps and a social structure and an entire history, I just called him weird. But he was definitely smart.

Luckily I was still about twice his size. I went through puberty all in one summer and began to shave in eighth grade. My brother went through puberty more slowly, like a tree growing. You couldn’t ever notice it but over about 10 years I guess he got taller. But for a while there I could still beat him up. And I did. Or at least until I was old enough to realize that only a loser would beat up a brother 5 years younger and half his size. I think I was 17 when I realized that.

And then I moved out. I went to college, got married, went to work, bought a house, had kids. And in the meantime my brother started to have more friends, go on dates, get a car, even get tall enough to play some sports. He got a life. And he got even smarter. When he was a freshman in college the seniors would come to him for tutoring. Everyone ran their class schedules by him because of his total command of the university catalog system. He was elected Academic Affairs Vice President for the student government. Oh, and did I mention that he was on a scholarship? He graduated with three of those cool gold usher rope tassles around his neck. I didn’t remember having any. Then he got a full ride scholarship to get his masters degree… at Princeton! Then when he graduated from there they kept him around to do his PhD by giving him a full ride again.

By that point I was beginning to feel like the tall guy in Everybody Loves Raymond who is always out-shined by his younger brother Ray Ramono. For sure my family still loved me, but since they all seem to have “Dr.” in front of their name and most people call me “hey you” I began to wonder if I was out of place. I wondered if I could just beat my brother up again over Christmas vacation and it would make me feel better. But no, that wasn’t a good option anymore. I would just have to resign myself to the fact that he would do his thing and I would do mine.

I remembered the moment when I could never again doubt that he was definitely smarter than me and it wasn’t all a fluke. I have a masters degree myself. In theology—the same field my brother is in. But when he sent me his Masters Thesis I had to look up two words in the title! And I hadn’t even tried to penetrate the paragraphs yet.

The other day I was reading an article he was submitting for one of the top Academic Journals in his field. I gave him some feedback on a few of the words being too obscure. I had to ask them what they meant. He replied, “Well, I’ll check with the editors but I think those are pretty well common knowledge for the readership of this journal.”

Maybe I will beat him up for Christmas.