For most of my life, I’ve failed to get along with my older brother. Our relationship, even when we were kids, was… strained. One of the clearest memories I have of him from my childhood was from just before Christmas, 1989, when I was eleven. Like all kids do, we were searching around our house for our carefully hidden Christmas presents, and I happened to find mine, tucked away in the bottom of the closet of my parent’s camper-trailer. It was a Nintendo GameBoy, the original one, the year it launched.
I had fiddled around with a GameBoy at a local video store and had been begging for one for months. I was out-of-my-mind excited for it. In my euphoria I confided in my big brother about what I’d found. He seemed to share my excitement, telling me how cool it was. That night, I was pulled into our dining room by my parents and dressed down for having looked for and found the presents. My mom was crying – they’d put a lot of planning into this and were disappointed that I ruined the surprise. They contemplated the idea of returning the gift rather than giving it to me. My brother had told them what I’d done.
It might give you an inkling for the direction of this post, when that’s one of the strongest memories I have of my childhood relationship with my brother. For an eleven-year-old, I felt a profound sense of betrayal. I’d looked up to him before then – who doesn’t look up to their big brother? – but I rarely ever trusted him after that point, especially not during our childhood. That event set the tone for our relationship for years to come, and gave me a harsh lesson in the care I must take in choosing who I can trust. If not my own big brother, then who?
Over the years, our relationship had never been what you’d call good. He wasn’t really around for most of my junior high years, having shipped off to the Air Force after graduating high-school. Even after he’d been discharged a few years later and was living somewhat close by, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time with him. When I did, it invariably spiraled into some sort of argument. I remember, when I was in high school, almost coming to blows with him in our house in central Oregon one day, barely dodging out of range of one of his punches.
My brother’s relationship to our family was never very tight. The older he got, the more embittered he became, which led not only to his own constant state of unhappiness but seemingly endless attempts to infringe on the happiness of the rest of our family. More times that I can count, my father or I would have to comfort my mother after he’d made some particularly horrendous comment to her, or railed against some decision or other that my parents had made through the course of their lives. In spite of everything my parents had done for him, there was always another poisonous comment or graceless barb waiting in the wings.
His was an attitude of “I didn’t ask to be born; the world owes me.” That attitude, combined with a constitutional lack of the ability to agree to disagree, poisoned every single relationship my brother ever attempted, from minor acquaintances to significant others to the closest of family. In his world, it is not possible for someone to differ from his opinion without that person being naive, ignorant, fascist, or some combination of the three.
We hung out more often through the late 90’s and early 00’s, but the more time we spent together, the more tense our relationship became. The pressure of our incompatibility would just build and build until finally exploding. Through most of our adult life, our interactions were punctuated by long periods of no contact, inevitably precipitated by some horrendous, un-winnable argument. Over the years, the arguments got worse and worse, not only in intensity but in content. The last truly major argument we had, he was blaming my ailing father for the death of our mother, who passed away from an accidental drug overdose due to a faulty medicine patch (needless to say, it had nothing to do with my father at all).
After that incident, our relationship was basically irreparable. Less than a year later my father passed away, and we made some superficial attempts to be somewhat brotherly again. The idea was a doomed one, unstable because of his dislike for me and my distrust of him. The tragedy of my father’s death brought us back into each other’s presence, but never really brought us closer. I’d realized this, but made the attempt anyway, out of an overinflated sense of family obligation that was never reciprocated. Everyone with whom I confided told me to not bother making the attempt, but I did it anyway because… well, because he was my brother.
Over recent years, not only had we grown apart because of our differing political opinions and underlying mistrust, but he continued to fall down a rabbit hole of borderline racism, blatant homophobia, and excruciatingly ingrained misogyny. But amongst all of that, the thing that I could no longer stand was simply his treatment of the people in his life. The pedestal upon which he placed himself never allowed for anyone to rise out of the muck he perceived them to wallow in, which resulted in a wild and never-ending disrespect for everyone around him.
We’d had yet another falling out a couple of years ago, mostly over political ideals. I asked him to stay away for a while; I needed a break from him if there were ever going to be a chance of repairing what little bond we still clung to. I’d seen him only a handful of times over the last couple of years, mostly on holidays. After spending a mostly nice and only slightly awkward Christmas together this year, he trod all over our relationship once again.
Where am I going with all of this? It starts here:
A few weeks before Christmas I’d watched this video, and it got me thinking. Thinking about the strain of my relationship with my brother, and the impact it was having on my life. Thinking about how often I talked about some shitty comment or other that he had made, thinking about how much of my thought-space he was occupying even without being directly involved in my life. Thinking about how stressed I was every single time I thought about him coming over and spending time in my home, or spending time with him in public.
Ash Beckham’s speech resonated with me deeper than I thought it would, pointing out my own “closet” – that hard conversation I’d had yet to have. Every time I’d had a falling out with my brother, I’d somehow let him back into my life. In most cases, it required an ever-escalating reason to overcome the initial transgression, the final time being the death of my father. I found that my reasoning was always something to the effect of “he’s the only brother I’ve got”. Over time, I began to realize (but didn’t want to admit) that that reasoning wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t enough to overpower all the negativity that came with just being in my brother’s presence.
A few days after Christmas, he lobbed the grenade that finished our relationship. It wasn’t anything that much worse than things he’d done in the past, but it was at a time when I’d finally come to grips with the fact that my familial bond with my big brother just didn’t exist. When, in one fell swoop, he disrespected one of my best friends, my brother-in-law, myself, and even the nice Christmas I’d organized for our family, I couldn’t hold the load anymore.
My brother’s M.O. has always been to act inappropriately and expect an apology after-the-fact to erase his actions. When he attempted his half-assed apology this time, I made the conscious decision not to accept it. I told him it was time for us to go our separate ways. I was oddly serene about it – I wasn’t angry or hurt or upset, I just wanted it over with. I was angered by his actions toward one of my friends, but I wished him no ill-will and simply told him that we’d be better off not being around each other.
In his final act of our relationship, my brother began by taking offense at my “tolerance” of him, and then proceeded to insult almost every portion of my life from my “oversensitivity” to my political stance to my career choices to my marriage, and in the course of that rant provided perfect and final justification for my decision to divest him from my life.
“Family” and “blood” are not synonymous. Whether you’re related by blood or you’ve taken the leap to accept someone as your family, there has to be limits to how far that idea will protect them from consequences. If someone has a cancerous presence in your life, you absolutely must have the will to excise them, regardless of any artificial constructs you may be using to support the idea that the relationship is necessary or unbreakable. We don’t have enough time on this earth to for those ideas to give someone carte blanche to infringe on our happiness.
It took a lot of years and a lot of heartache, stress, tears, and hand-wringing for me to learn this lesson. For the first time in a long time, I feel like I’ve freed up both the mental and emotional space that was occupied by my relationship with my brother, and it’s amazing how relaxed it’s made me. I know that this wasn’t a one-way street – he didn’t get along with me just as much as I didn’t get along with him – so hopefully he’s found the same sort of peace from this parting that I have.
