A crowded mind

“How can things go back to the way they were when so much bad had happened?”

It’s a saying from Samwise Gamgee that I think about a lot. Especially with how true it is. These past few months have been a true example of a mental and emotional torment. And a family torn apart cannot be mended so easily.

When you have an older brother, especially being a girl in this day and age, you feel like you have a protector for life. Someone you can count on for anything. Bad breakup? Call in your big brother. Sad? Talk to him. The list goes on. But what do you do when that protector puts you in danger?

From what I’ve learnt these past few years, there isn’t anything you can do. At least not physically. Mentally you try to understand and try not to hurt your already damaged heart even more. But let me explain why.

My brother is a drug addict. There I said it. It’s been easy for me to admit it but it was only out of pure anger for his decisions. But over time, his decisions resulted in others around him facing the consequences on his behalf. But first, let me go back; because you can’t judge the book until you read the story.

Growing up, our lives weren’t perfect. Granted my siblings and I were privileged. Nice homes, both parents, food on the table, you name it. My brother was the first born. I came along two years and one month later than him. Three years after me, my younger sister. Then sixteen months later, my youngest sister. Being as young as I was, I didn’t pay attention to a lot of things. Mom always said I had my head in the clouds; always dreaming and writing. But I was aware of what was happening.

Back in the eighties, mom and dad got married. People around town said their wedding was the party of the year. Knowing what I know now, I don’t look at that wedding with the joy of seeing my parents so in love. I look at it with tears of pain for my mother. My mother, a good person who was roped into marrying the wrong man. When they were together in high school, my mother described him as the typical bully who happened to be an athlete.i didn’t believe her until I heard his friends tell stories about dad beating up people with their help. Stand up guy right?

My dad came from a broken home. My grandfather wasn’t exactly father of the year. The stories I’ve heard about him I can’t share because I don’t want to upset anyone who’s endure domestic abuse. But if you can imagine hiding under a bed from your angry father because you didn’t pick up your toys, then you have a good image of what it was like for him. My grandmother passed away when I was four. Legend has it she endured hell from my grandfather. And passed away without getting her chance to stand up to him.

Fast forward a few decades and my father meets my mom. According to their old friends, my mom was supermodel beautiful. A true natural beauty. Guys wanted her, but my dad got her. I’m starting to wonder in my age if my dad “got her” or “took her”. Yup, my parents relationship was like something out of a law and order SVU episode. Mom always told us about his mean attitude, his jealous nature, and his bar fights with guys who hit on my mom. That was the first time they broke up. But dad didn’t give up. He followed her and her friends out to an island off the coast of our hometown and practically begged her, in public surrounded by people, to take him back. I wonder what that crowd would have done if they knew my dad had cheated on her and got his friends to lie for him. Would they have chased him off? If she had said no, would my siblings and I even be alive? But that wasn’t my mother. She believed she could change him. I love her, but she was young and innocent. And on the flight out to the honeymoon, she endured verbal abuse.

My brother was born in nineteen ninetie one, three years after they married. He was an adorable little boy. The first grandchild of eleven on my grandmothers side and ten on my fathers side. He was everyone’s son. And the one everyone was hard on. Seriously, the home videos I’ve seen are awful. Why is it so hard for people to let a toddler be a toddler?

When I came along, things were interesting. I was the first girl on both sides of the grandkids. They say having a daughter changes a man. I just don’t think it changes a sexist man. That’s right, on top of being a verbal, mental, and sometimes physical abuser, my father was, and still is, a sexist man. You should see how he talks to my sisters and I now as adults. Granted, I have my personal reasons to hate him. I inherited a heart disease and other health problems from his side, mostly due to genetics. You think I wanted to grow up with a literal dying heart? I can’t even hike along the coast without having to worry about whether or not I’m going to pass out. How much fun is that?

But going back to my family, my birth didn’t change him at all. Apparently, it just made things worse. You see, my father expected my mother to be a housewife. And she did. She left a good job to take care us. And once the abuse started, it started changing how we lived and how we acted. Granted there is photos in our books of us as a happy family. But they won’t show the other side of the picture. The one where my mom would endure a verbal beating if my siblings and I didn’t pick up our toys before dad got home from work. If we were too loud at the table, we’d get snapped at. And God forbid mom defend us like a mother should. Because in my dads eyes, that was a direct challenge to his authority. And would result in us, four frightened little kids listening outside their bedroom door at them screaming at each other. No kid should have to hear that. In my twenties, I still feel my stomach drop whenever they yell at each other.

As we got older, mom and dad started yelling at each other in front of us. Then it escalated to him hitting her in front of us. I’ll never forget dad pushing mom into the wall. I was in the kitchen behind them. Trapped is an understatement with how I felt. What was so disturbing was that that argument started with my dad getting on my brothers back about not taking out the trash in time. That’s how most of the arguments started. It was always something my siblings and I did. A part of me still believes that my mother hates us deep down. But I know she’ll never admit it. She says all the time that she stayed with dad because she didn’t want to put my siblings and I through divorce. Seeing how we were mentally affected by it all, I have to say it wasn’t a wise decision. I truly believe my siblings and I have our issues because we were always fighting amongst ourselves on which parent was right and which parent was wrong.

So how does all this effect my brother and his decisions? I’m sure every girl reading this has heard of the White Knight Complex. Where a guy “rescues” a woman from a terrible environment and treats her like a queen. I’m sure my brother would be the poster boy for White Knights.

Growing up, he was the pretty boy at school. Girls flocked to him. He had a girlfriend all the time and they were long relationships. Not with the best outcomes. I guess he got bored with them and let them go. But being a football and baseball player that plays the guitar has its perks. He had no shortage of girls coming after him. So why choose the girls that come from broken families? Simple. He’s saving them.

He’s saving them because he’s reminded of what my mother went, and is still going, through. Drug addict mothers, fathers in jail, you name it. We thought his second to the last girlfriend was his future wife. A tough woman with a good head on her shoulders. She was like a big sister to me. That is, until he got her pregnant. I admit I was stunned to learn I was going to be an aunt. But I was even more stunned when I woke up one morning and found him asleep on the couch. He was living with her, so I couldn’t understand why he was here. Turns out, she had miscarried. And they were never the same. I saw the scratches on his face the next morning.

That was enough for me to hate her guts. No one hurts my family and gets away with it. But my brother and his complex just had to take her back. And we had to act like nothing happened. I couldn’t believe it. How could we, especially my parents, just act like he didn’t have an almost scar on his face? Maybe they overheard my crowded mind and understood why I was so cold to her. Another year went by and it was over for good. Much to his protests.

So he moved back home. And back into our garage. Yeah, he decided to convert the garage into a little apartment. Except it smelled, was filled with garbage, and guitars. Then we started seeing the liquor bottles. His night owl life didn’t fit in with the people who had to wake up for work.

A few years later he introduced us to his latest girlfriend and man was she the perfect girl for his white knight complex. Two kids from two different psycho men. Abused, drug fueled, and pretty much mentally unstable. And yes, he is over the moon for her. I know I know. It’s ridiculous. But I’m this day and age, getting together with someone who has a prestarted family isn’t something bad anymore. People have lightened up. But in my brothers case, it’s pretty bad. How could he take care of three people while living in a garage? And have no desire to move out or get a job?

This relationship really took a role on my family. Especially my younger sister. You see, the men in her life have failed her over and over. Especially my father. While the rest of us coward before my father, she stood up to him. Time after time, he’d beat her so bad the neighbors would start to question us. Her relationship with my dad is pretty much dead and gone. And the abuse hasn’t stopped. What kind of a father assaults their child for not getting out of his way?

So when my brother came back home, she rebuilt her relationship with him through music. And in comes the new girlfriend, who magically happens to be a singer. I’ve never seen my sister so heartbroken when he chose his new girl to sing with him over her. That prompted some real hatred. But that’s when we started noticing things about him.

We knew about the liquor. But we didn’t know about the drugs. He started behaving erratically one night making steak. Like he had drank five red bulls at nine o clock. Nothing to worry about, maybe he was just energized. Right? Wrong. I don’t remember the exact date, but my mother awoke one night hearing him screaming and groaning in pain. He had an episode and had taken drugs to calm himself down. Of course mom being the woman she is, she tried to calm him down. And for a while, things did calm. Until they broke up for the first time.

He was a wreck.

He was constantly high strung, crying, and flat out insane. Then we find out that they magically got back together. But only after he begged her. None of us could figure out why. Until he started opening up to us under the influence. We had found out that she had supplied him with calming drugs to make him relaxed. She also had them as well. And also gave them to her baby daddies to calm them. It took a while to realize that he wasn’t in love with her, he was in love with what she could get him. I don’t know how messed up his mind was, but he tried to paint this image as some happy family. I can’t even describe how hard I laughed.

Overtime, the situation got worse. The only people in my family who tried to show them grace was my father and youngest sister. My brother would often use her two kids to play on my parents emotions into accepting the relationship. But how? How can you accept a relationship where you can hear them yelling at each other in the garage on a silent night, hitting and screaming? How can you accept a relationship where drugs are the only thing that calms you both down? How can you accept a relationship that turns your brother into a junkie?

And when I say junkie, I mean a major junkie. My mother first noticed that money she have saved up had gone missing a few years ago. Then more kept going missing. Then more. When she confronted my brother, she had taken the inetiative to kick him out. But in comes my sexist father to tell him to stay; behind my mothers back. He said he won’t have a son on the street, but I knew better. He always allowed my brother to get away with anything, meanwhile my youngest sister gets slapped in the face for wanting to go to a party with my cousin.

Considering how evil my father got, most of us were afraid to say anything. So in he would come, doing his nightly routine, keeping us all up. Often, he’d be handling fire and knives while under the influence of laced drugs he got off the street. That never went over well. And dad was never around to see it. He would be sound asleep while my mother, sisters, and sometimes I would have to deal with him. One night in December of twenty nineteen he had taken a hard drug and passed out on the walkway in the front of our house. Earlier that night, he, my younger sister, and my dad all came to blows. I was so scared. I knew someone was getting punched. And it took all my strength to protect my sister and my father at the same time. That night we found out he takes these drugs to calm his emotions. How pathetic is that? That was the night I had changed my opinion about him. He didn’t do the drugs because he was messed up, he did it because he was a coward.

The months went by. And now in April twenty twenty, he’s no longer allowed on the premisise. Why, you ask? For legal reasons I cannot say. But it involves stealing to get a five dollar rush. He had gone full blown junkie. What makes it worse is that he used my youngest sister as a fall guy. Before this, my father was blind. Blind to his actions, and blind to the fact that my siblings and I were no longer children who lived in fear of him. Because of my brothers selfish need of a rush, my parents almost lost their home. We know now he’s living in a hotel; casually acting like nothing is wrong. He and his girlfriend are the modern day cons. That revelation was like a knockout punch from Mike Tyson. But you know what’s sick about all this? My father still verbally abuses my sisters and I.

We know he’s upset because we aren’t grieving over my brother. But in reality, I am almost laughing in freedom. My brother and I haven’t said a word to each other in months. When someone is hurting you, you cut them off. It’s healthy to remove the bad people from your life. Even if their blood runs in your veins. This sense of rising joy is a sign of freedom. No more nights of worrying about whether or not he overdoses. No more hearing him screaming. No more having to sling him over our shoulders because he’s too loaded up to walk. No more checking our rooms to make sure he didn’t steal things to pawn for drug money. For my sisters and I, it’s freedom. For my mother, it’s hell.

How do you ask a mother to part with her son? How do you ask a mother to pray for a son who’s put her in danger for his own selfishness? How do you ask a mother to love a son who blames her for his bad decisions? The answer is, you don’t. She just does. A mothers love is the greatest love we can have. But what we do with it is a different story. My crowded mind has taken on the burden from my mother; who wept loudly as she looked through his belongings. Lost memorabilia from his sport days. Pictures of him as a toddler. His old shirts he wore when he was a child. And all in the span of twenty four hours until her fifty seventh birthday. It builds up rage towards your brother within you. And reminds me of what I said in the beginning of this. What do you do when that protector puts you in danger? The only thing to do is to move on. But like Sam says, how can you go back to the way things were when so much bad had happened? To add, “how do you pick up the threads of an old life”.

My family and I do not know what the future holds. And I question why this has happened during a world wide pandemic. Perhaps this was a time of rebirth. Perhaps us being in this house together was enough to make us realize that this family needed to heal. No matter how much my father protests against us women, we still need to heal. And confronting problems have never been my fathers strength. At this point, I should just call him my provider. Because that’s all he was.

I can’t describe how silent the house is now. It’s almost peaceful. It’s a cruel irony. But our challenge now is to rebuild ourselves. We now have outside family to lean on, because they know of my brothers mistakes and my fathers idiocy tendencies for illogical control over my mother, sisters and I. A part of my soul cannot be rebuilt as it harbors my sense of trust. But at least it can rest knowing that my mother can finally be at peace. And in regards to my brother, he knows what must be done. If he wants to rebuild himself, he must go to rehab and remove his girlfriend from his life. But let’s hope he’s strong enough to break that chain of pride that have shackled him and my father together. Pride has tried to kill my family before, but let’s hope this time our years of torment have turned into years of wisdom.