Family nightmare

To you, little blog, I will turn with my sorrow. I cannot express it to anyone else.

What I thought would be a relaxing week with my family turned into a nightmare, and today the horror continues.

I have a sibling with long-established social llproblems, which we’ve always blamed on a certain emotional disorder which runs in our family, and in his case, a little bit more, which I cannot reveal here. During my visit home, he and his wife were at the epicenter of family quarrel after family quarrel – a scene of tears, tantrums and even cursing such as I have never seen there.

I was bewildered by his behavior, by his wife’s behavior, by my grandmother’s response, by my mother’s response.

Today, talking to another sibling, let’s call him X, a horrible possibility emerges.

My late paternal grandfather was a hard man and my father rarely speaks of him. We’ve long known of said grandfather’s alcoholism and suspected that he was abusive. We’ve been proud of my father for giving up the bottle early in his marriage and for striving mightily to break the cycle. Today, he is a sweet, lovable man with only rare bursts of temper that lead to nothing physical, so far as I know. But this afternoon, Sibling X, who has lived with, and closer to, the family for much longer than I have, made a suggestion: that my father’s effort to overcome his upbringing took longer than I believed, and that his rages over the years have been more terrible than I knew, that they crossed the line at least once into genuine physical and emotional abuse.

This would explain the strange behavior and apparent emotional instability of my mother. She has been abused – not ever to the point of black eyes or broken bones – not even at his angriest could I suspect my father of such – but by harsh names, by slaps, by hands around her throat at least once. These things I vaguely remember witnessing in childhood – only a few times but could there have been more?

Sibling X and I, I learned today, independently vowed never to hit a Woman and we have both kept our promise to ourselves. I have made the protection and uplift of Women one of my life concerns. But what of the other sibling? I hesitate to be more specific, I need to keep this blog anonymous, maybe I shouldn’t have written any of this. Let’s just say that this sibling is an instable, explosive person – and he is married, with a baby. Could he have inculcated lessons of anger learned in childhood, could he be continuing the cycle that my dad struggled so hard to break? Could this explain the nightmare of this week?

Could some of my own peculiarities – my difficulties in responding properly to authority figures, for example – be traced to a childhood that was rougher than I actually remember it?

My dad could be so tender and caring. There was a certain time when I probably deserved a whipping and he put me over his knee but couldn’t go through with it. There were other times when he rapped me on the head and called me names, or went into a rage because I didn’t agree with certain petty things, but I remember nothing worse than that. I don’t believe I have any of those infamous, so-called repressed memories. But could things have been different, worse, for my mother, my other siblings? The thought makes me sick.

And if my mother is a classic abuse victim, even if my dad has finally purged his own demons, is my grown sibling now manipulating her – and if so, what can I do? How can I help him, and her? From the thousands of miles away that I live from them?

It’s easy to simply and utterly hate a stranger who hurts a Woman, to wish him a slow, pitiless and painful death crushed in heavy machinery – but when the possibility rears up within your own family, with men whom you dearly love, it is not so black and white, it is not so cut-and-dried.