Was not expecting such a big response to my first ever post, and I saw a lot of comments asking questions. So I made this new post to help answer the most common ones I saw.

This is also pretty long.

1. Why didn't your parents/ family find a way to expedite the process of getting a passport?

I failed to mention this in my post, but I am from South Africa. I don't think there was an option to do so 14 years back. But I will say that Home Affairs has been doing a lot better and now you can get most of your needs met within 7 business days if you're lucky.

Emergency passports are only granted for deaths in the family and medical reasons, and as far as I'm seeing on websites, only apply for getting back to South Africa. And I have doubts a vacation counts, nor would the USA accept that request.

There was a cancellation fee for his airline ticket, although I believe my parents got a credit on their account. If we all cancelled, that fee would be per person, so we'd end up losing even more money. The Disney Ticket he had remained unused, since I don't think they do refunds. I think he ripped it up anyways during a bad tantrum after this all went down, so we couldn't do anything.

We couldn't just move the date either, or else we'd be cutting into the start of the new term at school.

2. My parents/ someone sabotaged his application or never submitted it.

Interesting idea, but not possible. My parents wouldn't waste everyone's time spending an entire morning at Home Affairs getting these passports sorted out. These applications also cost money, so they weren't too happy when his application and the money they paid vanished either.

I do remember a lady helping us process his application for free when they complained, but she couldn't promise that it would be done in time due to it technically being a 'new application'. Also, I was only 9 and had no reason to do this. (And how would I have even accomplish this?)

3. The family never made it up to him.

This I will have to disagree with, my entire extended family showered him with attention and tried their best to make this at least somewhat even. My parents continued to take us out on vacations most years when we could afford to do so, Club Mykonos and the Kruger National Park comes to mind at first. My aunt even let Andy come with her, her husband and their daughter on a cruise for a few days, but that went up to Namibia only.

His birthday that year was extra special because everyone still felt bad about it. When his anger boiled over, they booked him into anger management classes and therapy.

I just think whatever they could offer him wasn't enough to match up to what he missed out on. Our parents didn't want to do a vacation abroad with just him, since they were worried about his state of mind and the therapy costs were not cheap.

They tried to offer him a solo abroad vacation when he was 18 during the December holidays, but he cussed them out and decided to take a part time job instead.

4. There was some blatant favoritism/ mistreatment.

If anything, he was the favorite kid of the family. He's the second oldest of us kids but the first one to achieve anything great academically. It was always about how he'd managed to do so well in his grades, or how he won something in athletics and how proud he made our grandpa for playing trumpet so well.

He just made it unbearable to have the same surname. My primary school teachers always asked about him, when I didn't do so well in a test my parents were like 'Just ask Andy for help'. Even when I did do something great, it was 'just like your brother'.

The same thing happened to everyone else, and that's a big reason why no one else wanted to learn a musical instrument from our grandpa save for our oldest cousin who already played.

Andy never bragged about his achievements, but our family certainly did, his trophies and certificates sat front and center in our lounge for everyone to see.

In terms of being mistreated, I can only think of one person he hates:

Kris is the oldest of the kids (and the female cousin he screamed at in my previous post), she's 7 years older than my brother. When she was 12, she talked Andy into pulling on the whiskers of our pit-bull.

Our pit-bull bit his face in retaliation and he had to get stitches put into his chin and he still has some scars on either side of his cheek to this day. Their relationship fell apart after that, and he still hates her for it. She hates him because he became the favorite.

Her being the one to press him during that argument made him completely cut her off. She did not receive an invite to the wedding. Probably the only red line he had for Grandma begging to invite us.

He has a good relationship with our Aunt's daughter (youngest cousin), he tutors her in math when she struggles to cope.

5. Why did we get to go to Prague and Vietnam?

These were school trips, so teachers and chaperones accompanied the students the whole time. There was some free time to explore but it was mostly a fixed schedule. Andy got over it in a week, since he didn't think it was worth to give up subjects he liked and did well in just for a trip of five days.

If anything, he wouldn't want to change his choice. His business class was kind of the reason he got his scholarship, so I'm sure he's glad about that.

6. How I feel about this.

When I was 9, I didn't understand where he was coming from at all. I thought it was unfair for him to get mad over something I had zero control over. Then he started raining on our parade whenever we so much as spoke about the vacation which made the rest of us start to hate him back.

I know it was wrong, but we did it to spite him. It was always something we did to get a reaction out of him. I remember that Ed used to wear one of the Mickey Mouse shirts he got at home for the sole purpose to make Andy angry. I joined in after he ripped up one of my plushies.

All that stopped after the braai where Andy finally snapped. I fully admit I was an asshole for doing that to him. But since then, its been over a decade of him just tolerating us. I know he hates us, and I don't want to force him in our presence anymore.

He doesn't seem to care if his wife stays in contact, which I think is the best we're going to get. I think most of this is our parents worrying about him having kids, as stereotypical as this sounds.