Today is my brother’s birthday.
He’s the one on the right, in the striped shirt, holding out his Easter basket. I think I was 13 or 14 here (please ignore the terrible shorts, the eyebrows), which would make him 9 or 10.
My brother has spent the last 7 years in and out of jails and treatment programs. He’s an alcoholic, a drug addict, a narcissist, a master manipulator. He has what I suspect to be a host of undiagnosed mental problems. He goes through delusional phases; paranoid phases; phases of a cold, calculated meanness that are truly terrifying. He’s also a kid inside still, a kid who I know gets scared sometimes, who feels alone and abandoned, who is lost, who wants help. He’s a kid who has been betrayed by the system, has internalized that betrayal, has given up trusting any authorities or following any laws, and has thus given the system reason to keep beating him down.
I honestly don’t remember the last time I talked to him. It may have been as long ago as a year.
I don’t know how to wish him happy birthday. I could have mailed a card to him. I didn’t. I still can, I can still write and say “Happy belated birthday, how are you, mom says you’re in a good program at the jail where you can go outside and work sometimes, I’m married, I have a little dog that licks his foot too much, this morning I ate a blueberry muffin, the sky is blue here, did your broken foot ever heal.” I could write “Remember the time you cried at the movie where the horse died, remember the time I made you put on ballet shoes and enact The Nutcracker with me, remember the time you ate so many hot dogs and brownies on Memorial Day weekend that you threw up.” I could send a card that was blank.
I could send a card that was blank except for the words “I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I love you.”
This is one of the better pieces of writing I’ve seen in ages. I’ve been thinking a lot lately of how we project ourselves. The free pass we give ourselves to be honest in heavy times and the veneer we slick back up in “good” times (as if life is always so clear cut, so cleanly divided). I have tremendous respect for people who shake up the edge of the curtain and let us peek underneath — especially with such evocative, eloquent, aching vulnerability.
