Brothers Without Arms

First, let me say this is the third blog I've attempted to write in the past three weeks. Hopefully, I will be able to complete this one—which, in turn, should motivate me to finish the others…

Family

Let's get a quote to start things off. Since I am feeling displaced at the moment, I did what I tell my students not to do: I went to Google, typed in "quotes family" and hit the first page that popped up. Three quotes down, I found this one:

"The family is a haven in a heartless world." The suspect site suspiciously notes "Attributed to Christopher Lasch." Okay then.

Without sounding too dour, I'm currently of the mind that this is the root of (or at least a contributor to) all our worldly woes:

Family is no longer a haven in an increasingly spiteful world.

This revelation comes on the heals of a voice message from my mother. She called to inform me of finally hearing from my truant brother.

Without getting into the details (because, frankly, the details simply obscure the root cause; they are not the illness but simply compounded symptoms), I'll just say that my brother a) is deeply, emotionally, scarred (the poet in me turns to tragedy and cries fatal flaw!) and b) has not come to terms with my father's death. These two facts have led him on an errant quest which threatens to tear apart our close-knit, haven-like immediate family.

In short, my brother—without the oedipal overtones and creepy uncle-turned-stepfather—is Hamlet. His actions are misguided by a spectre he puts more trust in than the concreteness of accepted loss. He chooses to react rashly without seeing the cause of his madness—trusting instead the passion of his grief in lieu of the passion he so erroneously stamped out of himself long ago.

Having been the voice of reason for most of his life, I have chosen to be silent in hopes that some greater force (not that of a poison'd sword, mind you!) shakes some goddamn sense into him.

But let me go back to that "haven" thing again. Frankly, I don't buy it. Without resorting to an ignorant sweep of hand, I am prone to believe that the American family has never been a haven. Having first been cobbled together by misfits, castaways, and opportunists, then bound together by some sense of nationalism born of proud necessity, and finally stamped with the hollow hope of manifest destiny, the American family is exactly what we should have always seen it as—hopelessly dysfunctional. It's no wonder greedy opportunists have hoodwinked us into a comatose clan fattened on fast food and clobbered into pharmaceutical and multimedia addiction.

In this late hour, we cast our hopes to bring "it" back—whatever "it" might be. We long for the strength of family. But the very nature of the American Dream denies us the respite of our former haven. How can we seek out our destinies, establish ourselves on the frontier, without sacrificing the thing that grounds and keeps us true?

We can't.

Within the larger context of the world, I am inclined to remove that modifier "American" and say that all families are, at their cores, dysfunctional. Mind you, I'm playing fast and loose with "dysfunctional" because the horrors of this world are perpetrated by the confines of social norms. We need them to establish order, but they chafe like an over-starched shirt, or an itchy underwear tag.

Family, then, becomes just that: An improperly sewn label. The more we seek to de(re)fine it, the harder it is to maintain.

But, at the very least, we should be able to maintain our own family's integrity? Our family is worth something, isn't it? So why do we allow our "selves" to resist the outstretched arms of our kith and kin?

Okay, settle down. My wife and I talked about this recently (we talk about family a lot), and I've come to the conclusion that she has more faith than I do. And, frankly, she has a right to her faith. Or should I say it comes from a true place. After all, despite my family's faltering, we've been re-establishing her family. To this point, then, we have been establishing our family. There's hope in there somewhere. I love that about her.

Brotherly Love

Let's go back to that horrid quotes page. I couldn't find anything I liked (or felt was particularly enlightening), but this will do. Besides, it's Twain so it's worth repeating!

"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years." – Mark Twain

This is not applicable to me or my brother. That is, my brother and I were united in our love for my father. There was a time (those seven years Twain mentions) when he was embarrassing as hell, but it was good-natured embarrassment. We accepted it, even relished it at times—as I am quite sure my father did. But there was never a loss of respect between us.

My father was a great man. Flawed, but great.

And see, that's where the trouble lies. Going back to Twain's comment, my brother always idolized my father. The tragedy was that for the better part of my brother's childhood, my father wasn't around much. When he was, he wasn't particularly loving and open. Both my brother and I understand that better now. The weight of work presses harder on a father than most sons are able to understand. We've both long since forgiven him for that.

But there's another running thread in our family that goes something like this: I was my father's favorite; my brother was my mother's favorite. My brother also thought, on his own, that they both loved me more than they did him.

I now know that the truth was, as my father got older, and settled down a bit himself, he recognized that it was important to be around more, to play a much more active part in our daily lives. Unfortunately for my brother, this happened a little too late. What my brother saw was a doting on me that he had not received.

There's also the bit about birth order. As the oldest, my brother has always assumed that he was a child of trial and error, where as I had the benefit of experienced parents.

I'll admit that there may be some truth in that. Except that, in some respects, I became the more independent sibling. As we got older, I became the more grounded, socially stable one (har har). There were times we played roles like a married couple. I was the wife who took care of him, and he was the free-to-be-an-idiot bread-winner.

But all of this makes some simple sense. What doesn't work, though, is the idolatry. As I got older, I began to see the fractures and age-worn lines in my parents' existence. It was still the best relationship I had encountered, but it was far from perfect.

I, as have ages before me, began to see my parents as people.

My brother has never made that realization. As such, my father has become an absent god to him. He pays his fealty through a misguided mimicry. The bottom line is that my brother both unconsciously and consciously has been trying to live his life like my father lived his.

This shouldn't be so shocking since this is the way of things, right? I mean, "A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father," says Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And here again, my brother and I do not differ all that much. I am sometimes shocked when my father's habits and mannerisms present themselves in my actions. Hell, this damn blog is probably akin to something he would have written many, many moons ago!

But it seems my brother is dead-set to repeat and not learn from my father's mistakes. Why? Is this some desperate attempt to further garner his attention, his approval?

Well, yes.

What was that about Hamlet and Oedipus again?!

Tying the disparate points of this post together, I'm inclined to think that the root of my brother's problems is that he suffers from the converse of the oedipal complex. I will, in my cultural-critic-not-psychologist way, admit that there is something to be said about the tensions inherent in child-parent relationships, especially in regards to competing for attention.

Where the classic complex is guided by a patricidal impulse mixed with mother love, my brother subconsciously battled a matricidal impulse while harboring father love. In my brother's mind, he was competing with my mother for his father's attention. I was there, too, but it was my mother he was in true competition with (since I was an afterthought). Where my mother was simply trying to play out her part in the traditional cycle of things, my brother rebelled into a state of self-consciousness and self-hatred. His matricidal impulse has manifested in subconscious woman-hating and conscious escapism.

With my father's death, my mother's presence is an affront and her presence is intolerable. He, of course, blames her for his death and she is a constant reminder of his absence. This smacks of the Electra complex. Only, his desire manifests in escaping not killing.

This is, of course, speculation which he would deny (and maybe rightly so). But it makes sense to me, at least as I try to understand his motives. The problem is that somewhere along the line my brother never made it to the next stage. The tell-tale signs are in his dogmatic insistence on denying, or at the least delaying, love and happiness.

Interestingly enough, I think this is part of the mimicry again: My father spent his entire life delaying his own satisfaction in order to privilege ours. Because my father was never able to truly realize his own happiness, my brother feels he must deny himself the same.

Wow. Okay, there's a lot of swirling around up there.

Let's try to salvage something here. I love my brother despite his faults. And I do believe (hope) that some catharsis will occur (or be sprung upon him!). Because all that stuff about matricide, blame, mimicking, dysfunction is really just that—stuff. I am sure that my father did not die an unhappy man. Did he go gently into that good night? Certainly not! But there was some peace. He did, after all, love us. And while he may have denied himself happiness and rest, he did take pride and comfort in the fruits of his labor.

His family was the most important thing to him and none of us can deny that.

So, in the end, I have to recant. We've lost our way a bit, mostly because our grieving at the loss of a mighty patriarch has not yet run its course.

But I have faith (there's that again, too) that all will be well and that our haven will be restored.