Parenting & Family Quote by Margot Kidder

Kidder’s line lands like a private thought accidentally spoken into a stadium mic: intimate, slightly stunned, and full of that peculiar dissonance you get when someone you “raised” in your head becomes larger than you. Calling Chris “my kid brother” isn’t just affection; it’s a claim of proximity. In the celebrity ecosystem, where everyone is public property, the possessive pronoun quietly pushes back: I knew him before the world did.

The repeated insistence on “kid” and “as I still thought of him” does the real work. It marks time passing without granting emotional permission for the relationship to update. That’s a familiar human reflex, sharpened here by fame’s distortion field. Reeve isn’t just a colleague or co-star; he’s frozen in the role he played in her personal narrative, even as he’s rewritten himself in everyone else’s. The sentence becomes a portrait of cognitive lag: your memory keeps someone small while history makes them enormous.

Context matters: Kidder and Reeve are forever yoked to Superman, a franchise that minted modern blockbuster mythmaking. After Reeve’s accident and his transformation into a global advocate, the “incredible” she’s describing is less about stardom than scale of consequence. Subtext: superhero iconography turned real. The guy who once wore a cape became, through vulnerability and activism, a different kind of hero - one that forced even the people closest to him to recalibrate what they thought they knew.

It’s grief-adjacent awe, delivered with an actress’s instinct for the cleanest emotional beat: amazement without polish.