I'm so sick of my brother falling on his feet.
I have 2 brothers. Myself, and the older one have had relatively difficult lives. He's struggled with drug use, and mental health and has often been homeless. My first husband was severely disabled, I was homeless for quite a while, and had to sleep on the floor of the residential home he lived in for several years. When we did eventually get housed together by the council, I had to manage a care package, provide a lot of care myself, look after 2 children and work also. I found it incredibly difficult to provide the daytime care, so chose to do 5 nights per week, this meant getting up at least 10 times in the night to reposition, sometimes staying up all night doing chest physio. I was widowed at the age of 29, and I have remarried. We were rehoused by the council, and were lucky to get a small pleasant terrace in a nice area.
All of this time my younger brother has been living at home. He's the only one who went to uni, which my parents fully funded twice. Although he didn't complete the second one they paid for everything including catering for 7 full years, and a year in Chile. He's been back at home since then and has paid £50 per week to include all bed/board/bills etc. I'm not sure how much he earns, but he laughed his head off fairly recently. Somehow the figure of 20k was mentioned, and he thought it hilarious that I thought he might be earning this much, so I can only assume significantly less. He works fairly low hours, teaching children's languages classes after school etc.
He has had 2 fiancees since living at home. The first one was apparently great until she made it clear that she didn't want to live with them, and had her own career aspirations as a midwife. Now he's engaged again and I'm finding it physically sickening how mum keeps telling me how fantastic she is for him because she's such a good cook and housekeeper. 'He needs looking after, you know, he won't even make his own coffee'.
The lady in question seems lovely, if shy and quiet. She was very lucky to get the first job she applied for when moving near them, it's as a TA so I assume earns little. She only has to work term time, and my brother mostly works term time too, so they have pots of free time.
So now they've been looking for housing for after the wedding. My brother initially mentioned a tiny cottage on a main road, a little out of the area so it was cheaper. This seemed sensible to me, even though I was surprised they could get a mortgage at all.
But now I've had excited phone calls from both of them. Somehow they've secured a massive 3 bed semi, opposite my mum, and even includes all the furniture, kitchen goods, TV etc since they got in quick after the old lady died. I was astonished that this was possible, those houses are not cheap. Mum said 'he's done so well, he's saved up 50k deposit'. Which I was relatively impressed with until it transpired that almost all of that was from both sets of parents, and actually the numbers they gave don't add up it must be a much higher amount than that. He will be paying less than my council rent for 16 years and then he'll own a massive house! I've been paying full rent for 19 years already. They've also all arranged between all the parents to do all the childcare for the 4!! children that don't exist yet. Obviously, i do know, things might not go as planned.
I don't want to live opposite mum. I Don't want my childrearing planned out for me. I don't want to live in strict gender roles. but I'm still bloody jealous that he gets everything without hardly having to work.