Having Siblings Can Be A Pleasant Experience

Reflections on a past life:  As I was growing up, I lived in a domestic war zone.  There were four of us siblings.  My older brother and I were thirteen months apart—I wasn’t planned or hoped for.  Mistakes were made, and I was one of them.  Two and a half years later my sister was born.  She was always considered fragile.  If by fragile you mean she needed braces, then, yeah, she was fragile.  My younger brother was born nine years after I was born.  I had always hoped that, because he was considered the prince, he would escape the brutality inflicted by our parents upon the three of us.  I only later found out, after we three had gone our separate ways, there was no one to abuse but him.

In some families the children would band together to protect one another.  In ours it was each man/woman for him/herself.  Once, when my sister was singing, I did try to warn her that it was dangerous, but she continued.  My father raged into the room and she soon enough lost in voice—except for the crying and the tears.

I now think my father was bipolar.  Everything would be going along fine, normal—for us—and then he would explode for a reason only he saw.  He kept it together at work and with the rest of the extended family.  Only those who lived in that house knew the terror of his violence.  My mother?  I often wonder if her parents used physical discipline with her.  I find it hard to believe but I only knew them as loving grandparents.  But she ended up as co-conspirator to the physical abuse.

I’ve said before that the only happy childhood memories I have are being upstate with my cousins, my father nowhere around for an entire summer, my mother calm and relaxed.  I felt closer to those cousins than I did to my brother and sister because we were a gang and I could roam free.

But summers came to an end after my grandfather died.  No more upstate, no more cousins, no more months of prison release.

The alienation from my siblings didn’t end when I eventually left the house, went off to college, married, had children. There was just absolutely no connection with them except a negative one.  My older brother became this fantasist where what he said had limited basis in reality.  My sister, well, it felt like she resented me.  She and my mother sort of formed a cabal against me when the three of us were together—rarely.  As far as my younger brother, I barely knew him.

My father died.  That changed nothing in our sibling relationships.  Then my mother took a tumble and things got drastically worse.  My mother, allegedly a bright woman, made a stupid mistake.  She gave my older brother and my sister power of attorney for health, but made my younger brother the executor of her estate.  I was excluded from all of this, as I was excluded from most family issues.

As stated in a previous paragraph, my older brother was not only a fantasist, but to add to that he was incompetent.  He was incapable of handling his own life, let alone my mother’s.

Years followed where my older brother—and sister—made mistake after mistake after mistake in my mother’s care.  My mother had expressed the wish to stay in her own house—if possible.  My brother took that as if written in stone. Too bad he didn’t manage to do things like pay home insurance.

Well, the list is long and no point in going into it.  Let’s just say, I offered to have my mother here in assisted living. My young brother—a doctor!—offered to have my mother live near him in assisted living.  Nope.  My older brother wouldn’t even let the doctors and social workers contact my younger brother about what was happening.

My sister and I argued about my mother’s care constantly.  Finally, I just had to cut contact with her.  During that period of silence, she got cancer.  I blame myself.

My older brother, overweight, on oxygen, near death, decided this was the time to take a trip to Europe.  He died in a rental car on the side of a road in rural Spain.  My poor younger brother had to clean up this mess.  I didn’t volunteer.  When my older brother was interred, my younger brother with breaking voice said, “I don’t know why we could never get along.”  You couldn’t get along because he was so damn jealous of you because you became our parents’ favorite, I wanted to scream.  But not at the gravesite.

Three months later my mother, in a fog of her own for years, died.  The healing was about to begin.

As my sister has said often, my parents were two people who should never have had children.  That’s a point on which we’ll always agree.  But, with our parents gone, my sister and I communicate each day via texts and sometimes FaceTime one another.  The pain between us is totally gone, at least in my direction.  My younger brother, whom I rarely heard from before, makes it a point to call on holidays and at odd other times.  He never remembers anyone’s birthday, but is that important?

And I remain the repository of family events no one else can remember being so much older and okay perhaps more perceptive.  Oh, the stories I can still tell.  But won’t.  Unless they ask.