she got a call from my aunt joan in rhode island on friday night. my parents have been divorced since '79, but my mother still keeps in touch with my father's side of the family. which is more than my father does. after the divorce and after my father remarried, he began avoiding everyone in his family. he wouldn't even let his new wife, who i think comes from a rich family, see the humble dwellings he grew up in. for the past several years he has completely cut himself off from his family. till last week. he showed up unexpectedly at joan's house. after a few prelimaries he began quizzing my aunt about the history of heart trouble in the family and alzheimer's. my aunt said he looked bad, "something around the eyes", and that he was having trouble remembering things. he spent the entire visit talking about alzheimer's. my mother and i don't quite know what to make of this. my sister pointed out that he's always had trouble remebering anything that had to to with us. he's always been a selfish man and never much cared to know. then my mother told me about clay. he's a cousin of mine who beats me out as the biggest shame on the family. we have 500-something acres in austin - the land my mother's side of the family settled in when the came to texas 100 years ago. most of it is now a wildlife preserve, but we still have a few acres to ourselve with a house on it. my mother is sort of the executor of the house, and if you want to go there you have to clear it with her. my mother gave a friend of the family permission to stay at the house for the weekend. when the woman got there, she found my cousin clay passed out on the couch clutching a bottle. the woman called my mother, who in turn dispatched my sister (who lives in austin) to see what she could do. my sister drove there with her boyfriend, adrian. she went there and roused clay out of his stupor. as she started going through to see if clay had done any damage, clay walked out outside and over to adrian. he looked like shit - unwashed, torn shirt, reeking of whiskey, a black eye, and a pair of glasses held together by wire. my sister cleaned up the house and gave clay an hour to clear out. when she got back into the car with adrian, who is a complete yuppie, he said: "is he retarded." "no," my sister said, "just drunk. this is why i don't let you meet the men in my family." |
|
|
|
|
saturday,11;07p.m i love my family.you now why 'couse my family is everithing. |
|
|
It has become apparent to me that neither one of us likes, trusts, or respects the other. If he didn't need a place to stay right now, he would not be here. If he weren't my brother, I wouldn't let him remain in my life. I've had this realization before but it's finally sunken in, and I don't really feel sad about it except in an abstract sense. Once he moves away, I will probably see him again in July because my dad will want us to get together for my brother's birthday, but I don't expect to see him again for months after that. He only contacts me when he needs something, and I don't foresee him needing anything from me in the future. I don't feel the need to go as far as cutting him out of my life, and I hope I can sustain this emotional detachment. All of our lives we have been playing out the cycle of abuse, and I have to be on guard because I always always always fall for it when he starts being nice again and run after him like a puppy desperate for affection. Right now, though, it really feels as though it's truly clicked with me that I will never have a brother who loves me and with whom I can have a healthy relationship, and that any overture on his part that looks like, hey, maybe this time will be different, is a total fiction. I feel bad for his girlfriend, because she is a nice person and seems to have a good relationship with him, and I hope she doesn't feel too awkward in this last week here. |
|
It's a cycle because it usually begins with him being very nice and friendly for a short while, I think this time will be different and get overly hopeful, then the facade drops and the usual shit occurs and I get hurt and feel especially stupid because I've fallen for it for the n+1 time. (It really is Every Single Time.) Also because I find myself believing him that there must be something wrong with me that makes me treat me like this. The thing is that if anyone else treated me like this, I'd just write them off as an asshole and be done with it. Or the little things wouldn't even bother me, because clearly this person has issues and it's got nothing to do with me (seriously, if anybody else implied that I'm pathetic because I don't like Indian food, I'd just laugh and move on). It's just because it's this entrenched dynamic between us. I think I get as hurt as I do because I've always wanted a good relationship with my only sibling, and it hurts me that he so transparently doesn't give a shit about me. It's not even really personal to me except I get the brunt of it. He's always been more into his friends than his family, and as we've gotten older, it's become clear that he only keeps ties with his family because we'll help him when he needs something. He's very charming when he wants to be and our extended family isn't around him enough to see his other side. My mom finally cottoned on once she got sick; my dad makes excuses for him because he can't admit that he wasn't always a good parent. Honestly, I blame them for the way he is, because he was very hard to manage as a child and when he was still very young, they just gave up. He once told me our dad outright said to him, "I wash my hands of you," when he was a kid. |
|
Like I said, once he moves into his new place, that will be the last time I see him for a while. I've been working up the courage to go into therapy for grief and depression/anxiety for a while, so once I do that, I will bring up my brother and hopefully learn some more productive/protective ways of dealing with him. |
|
have. my advice is take his cat. |
brother sounds like a psychopath. You have every right to be upset at his behavior. |
|
We got into an argument the other night when he brought up the way he showed up at my doorstep at 2:30 AM when he got back from South America, when he pounded on the door and shouted incomprehensible things. I told him he had really scared me (I was so scared I felt nauseous), and he should have just said, "Hey [Spider], it's me [your brother]!" instead of randomly shouting nicknames for the cat after long stretches of silence. He kept telling me (in tones of pronounced scorn) how ridiculous it was that I was scared, and made it out to be a symptom of my apparent crippling anxiety and obvious weakness. I simply could not get him to understand that he can say I was being ridiculous because he knew I was perfectly safe, but I didn't know that, because I didn't know it was him at my door. Being scared when something unexpected like that happens, especially when you're woken out of deep sleep, is a perfectly reasonable and common response. He just wouldn't get it. Last night, my dad wanted to take me, brother, and his girlfriend to dinner, and my brother started the evening off in good spirits and was pretty talkative, but by the end of the meal he was back to monosyllabic grunts, and when we got back home he didn't speak to me. Nothing personal or emotional had occurred at dinner, and I didn't even talk a lot but just sat there and listened with a positive demeanor. In the past, I would think I had done something wrong and, oh woe, what was wrong with me that I drain the life out of him just being in his presence for a couple of hours, but I really see that it's his problem now. Fortunately, besides teenaged mischief, he's not a violent or destructive person. I think he's on the anti-social spectrum, but in general he's an upstanding citizen, and he treats his girlfriends well (as far as I can see). |
Your brother does display some psychopathic tendencies. And, I do worry about his girlfriend. As for him showing up unannounced at 2:30 Am I would have called the police. Any person banging on my door at that hour should be checked out by the cops. |
They are all more screwed up than their patients. It could be from too much education. Or, from being in constant contact with people who really need their help. Of course that is my humble opinion. But, I came to that conclusion when I took psychology in college. And, nothing I have seen since has changed my mind. |
sounds like a big deal, it's just that it's unrelenting." Actually it is all *huge* terrible stuff. Your brother is an asshole. That so-called Freudian slip is the truth. |
Oh, get this. My dad told me my brother has been complaining to him that I'm not accommodating enough. I laughed out loud! You mean, besides the fact that I'm letting him stay with me for three weeks until he moves into his apartment?! "You're not accommodating enough" SO CLEARLY MEANS, "You don't do what I want." Oh, and I get mad when he eats my food and uses up my stuff without asking first. I'm so mean, you guys! |
don't take any reference your brother may make to them seriously. They're more than likely an attempt to manipulate you emotionally. Remember, the most effective lie is 90% truth. How old is your brother? |
He'll be 33 in July (I'm 35 next month). Way too old for the two of us to be acting like this. PS. I'll be out of town this weekend, so today is my last day with their cat. :~( |
break. |
of familial rivalry. i feel almost bad about telling you to take his cat. but do it anyway. |
|
I came across this passage from John Steinbeck quoted somewhere and it made me think of him: No, to a monster the norm must seems monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.Not that he's a monster -- he really isn't; he's not a destructive or criminal person, and he apparently is a very good friend to his friends -- but he seems to lack a conscience, and this passage accurately captures his attitude toward me and other people who have one. |
I did/do have a closer relationship to our parents than he had/has, but he's always rejected their overtures at strengthening their relationship, always, from very young childhood to the present. I might have been the "good child" growing up, but how that played out was that my parents had high standards for me and when I slipped in even a small way they would come down on me hard, while they had low standards for him and rarely enforced them (and when they tried to, he would ignore them, anyway). I'd get smacked for saying "damn" and he once got brought home by the police after shoplifting with no repercussions from them. In high school, he threw out a ton of valuable and sentimental stuff they had collected over the years (like my father's journals he kept when he was a boy) and were storing in our basement, because he needed the space to practice with his band, and they didn't do shit to him. They didn't even yell at him, if I remember right. Maybe in some tortured way he is subliminally jealous of the energy they put into controlling my behavior while washing their hands of him. My anxiety in my adulthood has largely been centered around my fear of not being a good person, not being able to handle situations "correctly" (the entire time I sat with my mother as she was dying, I was wishing someone could beam the correct thoughts into my head so I could handle the situation in the proper way, as if there were one, best way to think in a situation like that), etc., which pretty obviously has its roots in the way I was raised. Maybe my anxiety issues are his target of choice through which to hurt me because he recognizes its connection to our parents and their attention to me. To me, my anxiety is a negative consequence of my upbringing, but maybe in some perverse way, it's a symbol to him of the care and attention my parents gave to me and not him, and this is what he's jealous of. Not the anxiety itself of course, but its origin. |
considering as part of the picture. i could explain this better if my brain hadn't shrunk to the size of a tennis ball by now. life itself is the act of reacting to the world using whatever tools you have: strengths, limitations, beliefs, self-love, etc. everyone has their own logic. in a way, i think that every human on the planet, in their way, lives on "another earth". (metaphorically). not all of them are compatible. people who are assholes or cruel or annoying i tend to see as ones who, maybe unconsciously, are lashing back at the world for some perceived wrong that they had received. at least a statistically relevant amount of the time. i think i have blathered a bit. but i still think spider is on to something. power to spider. |