Wherein I tell my brother to F**k off (long, but hopefully not too whiny)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I come from a seriously screwed up family. Screwed up in terms that counselors shake their heads and say it’s a wonder to get out of there at all.

I’ve got two brothers (and two sisters). The younger is possibly bipolar, but refuses treatment, and is living out of his car. We’ve had our run-ins as he wants me or my mother to support his live. I won’t but my mother can’t seem to say no.

I told him to fuck off after he accused me of killing my son, and said that one reason he couldn’t work was because how much Pough-chan’s death affected him. As I said, he’s sick, but I won’t put up with his untreated psychotic outbursts.

Then we come to my other brother, who is four years older than me. The person who was forever taking out his frustrations on me while we were growing up. The apple of my mother’s eye who never missed a chance to hurt her. The man who refuses to acknowledge my sister’s presence in a room because she’s gay, which goes against his precious Mormon teachings.

When my father lay dying in the hospital bed, he had run away because of the stress. That was when my family was coming apart, with my younger brother in the mental hospital and one sister bouncing back and forth between friends’ couches. She probably should have been in the clinic, too.

I put my life on hold for 6 long months to support my mother through the mess. After changing my father’s soiled pants, I’d go visit my younger brother in the hospital, as I was the only family member he would see. I had the police release my sister to me without charges. And I saw that my mother survived.

With my father hallucinating and not of sound mind, Mother and I had to make the difficult decisions on how much treatment to continue, and after months we finally decided enough was enough. He died in the night as I stood watch and let my mom rest.

All while the eldest son, the “birthright” boy was nowhere to be seen. Except to call my mother evil and of the devil. She should repent.

He found a “soul mate,” someone even more screwed up than him. They cut us out of their lives, choosing the cruelest methods to drive my mother away. Soon after one Valentine’s Day, my mother received the cards she had sent her grandkids, neatly cut in half. My brother attacked my mother’s faith and blamed her for the rest of us leaving Mormonism. He knew exactly where to slice.

We found out later that this psycho also cut off her own family as well. Their kids said it was weird growing up without relatives.

These are a few of the scores or hundreds of things I could say, but don’t have space. Except to add that one thing. That he raped both my younger brother and I.

So after 20 years, he decides that he’s going to get to know my mother again. Yippie. No apologies, no saying he’s sorry. My mother is just so happy to get him back, that she had already forgiven him without being asked.

So he shows up one day when I’m back home on a visit. Walks past me and holds court in the dining room as I ignore him. He call to me and wants to chat. I tell him to follow me outside for privacy and confront him.

He tell me how much pain that caused over the years. To him. How committing a sin against God has bothered him forever. That in addition to my younger brother and I, there were others.

But no apologies to me. Nothing about any pain that his victims would and did feel.

I told him that I didn’t hear an apology in there, and he said that he “was sorry that bad things happened to you.” Yes, carefully note the acute lack of any agent of action in that sentence. He said that he had nothing to say about his actions to the family. It was over and not to be discussed, let alone be sorry for.

So I told him to get his sorry ass out of dodge. When I was in town, he was to stay the fuck away.

And that is how it as been. Until I inadvertently included him in a mass email to my cousins announcing the recent birth of my son.

So he replied with a cheery message. Not a word of our last conversation. Still no word of remorse.

I’m done. I’ve tried and given him chances he didn’t deserve. I could have been mean, but that would just be sinking to his level.

When I confronted him that night a half a dozen years ago, he claimed that he’s not the same person, that he no longer fucks boys at will.

But I have no idea if that’s true. And I’m tired. So instead, I tell him it was oversight that he was on the mail, it won’t happen again.

And never, ever to contact me again.

For I have two little souls entrusted to me. I will die before I allow that scumbag to set eyes on their most precious hairs. Family togetherness be damned.

2

Sounds like good riddance to bad trash. Let it go.

Also, you don’t have to use fear for your own children to justify cutting him out of your life - you have more than enough reasons of your own.

3

Your wife has always sounded like a wonderful woman. I’m glad you have her in your life. Remember, we can’t choose our family, but that doesn’t mean we have to take care of them. There’s nothing noble in helping a person who won’t help themselves. I am practically estranged from my one brother, while the youngest and I are extremely close. You’re doing the right thing, even if it’s hard.

4

Thank you mischievous and lindsaybluth. You’re right. I have a hard time doing things for my sake, and this is a good time to practice.

I am lucky to have a good wife and great kids. I’ll concentrate on them.

5

TokyoPlayer, you did exactly the right thing! I’ve nothing against theists, I’m one, myself. But I despise it when people use religion as a cloak behind which to hide past crimes. If he had come to you with abject apologies for his past behavior, begged your forgiveness, and insisted that his belief system had changed his heart, I’ve no doubt you would have at least given him an opportunity to prove he had changed (albeit a cautious opportunity!), and was not that person anymore.

But your family loves you and needs you, so you need to take care of yourself, if for no other reason than that you have to be able to take care of them. Yes, it sounds trite, but you cannot fill another’s cup from an empty pitcher!

You have to take care of you, for your own sake and that of your family, and have taken a huge step in that direction. Good for you!

6

TokyoPlayer, it’s tough to remember that your relatives will try to pull you in to drown right alongside them. It can be friends from the neighborhood you grew up in, trying to bring you down to their level, so you can wallow in their misery. Rent the new Ben Afffleck movie The Town.

7

Yes, good riddance to bad trash. You have 2 wonderful kids and a lovely wife and that asshole isn’t worth your time.

8

I’m not really sure why his email was still on your contact list. Telling someone never to contact you is fair (I and a family member are in a similar situation). But when you contact him with good news, it was completely fair on his behalf to assume that maybe you were extending an olive branch.

If you want to keep things no-contact, then you can’t contact him. Ever, at all, for any reason whatsoever. He may be at a point in his life where he wants to make things right (for the god thing and his “soul”, if not for your personal happiness). I don’t think his response to you was out of line, you characterized it as cheery. You made the mistake of sending him the email, which to a crazy person may very well feel like an invitation back into brotherhood. So remove him from your email list, scour every bit of contact information you have for him out of your life. Establishing no-contact means you have to stick to it, too. Establishing contact-with-no-response isn’t fair to him or anybody (which I know you didn’t intend to do, but it was still your mistake).

Congrats on the new child =)

9

Thank you norinew, BaneSidhe and rachelellogram for your comments.

For the last post, I thought that I had made it clear that I’m not going to contact him again.

It was inadvertent. We recently got a list of most of the cousins’ email addresses, but not who was who. (There are 33 of us.) The cousin who compiled the list said he was still looking for a number of people’s addresses, and included my brother’s name, so I assumed that the list did not have him, but it look like it did. Rest assured that he will not be contact again by me.

And here are my two little ones.

10

That was just too cute, TP. :slight_smile:

11

They are adorable. The older one appears to like the camera :wink:

12

Great video! It’s nice to see you so well-adjusted after all you’ve been thru. Keep up the good work!

13

I dunno, given what you’ve said about him already, I can’t understand how you resisted the urge to break (at least) his jaw. Or set him on fire. I’m sure a lot of it is the Internet Tough Guy in me, but I can’t imagine that with my temperament such an encounter wouldn’t have ended without him bleeding at the very least.

He sounds like the worst kind of sociopath imaginable.

14

It doesn’t soumnd like she’d be likely to listen, but I think I might email his wife and tell her about the sexual abuse . If they have kids, she should know. He is not a different person, as evidenced by the fact that he is incapable of feeling or expressing remorse. Textbook sociopath.

15

squeeeeeeeeeee!

You are a truly remarkable person to rise from such hellish depths and give so much love to your adorable family. They deserve your care and time and attention; your brother doesn’t deserve the back of your hand. I’ll echo norinew above: charity begins at home. You take care of yourself and your own first and foremost. Cutting this monster out of your life is absolutely called for.

You have major priorities that need your focus, such as taking up yoga so that you won’t get a back spasm when Anya wraps you around that chubby little finger of hers.

16

We used to carry out the garbage cans together and I’d always bang my ankles. It wasn’t until we were adults that he said he used to do that intentionally. The funny thing is that it never occurred to me until I typed these words that he didn’t apologize when he told me that, either.

My friend and I remodeled my mother’s house for her one summer. Worked six days a week from 6 am until 10 at night. My friend’s wife was pregnant and they were moving overseas so he had a firm deadline on when he needed to be out of there. I was in school, and blew off the first month getting things finished.

I asked my brother if he could help with the dining room parquet floor. He said OK and could be over the following Tuesday. On Monday I called to confirm, and he said no, he wouldn’t be over. I asked why and he said that on his previous visit that I was “cold” to him and so he wasn’t going to help. I quickly apologized, that I didn’t intend anything and reminded him I was really busy trying to get thing finished, so if I seemed cold, it was because of the work.

All he did was just to repeat that I had been cold to him and that he was going to punish me by not helping. After trying again to clear up any misunderstanding, and getting the same BS from him, I finally told him to fuck off, and I was tired of his bullshit games. He’s done that for his whole life.

Of course, it wasn’t that I was “cold” or even “cool” to him. I found out later that he was unhappy that my friend and I were doing the remodeling. He had wanted to do it himself. He had done a couple projects for my mother with his friend (at going market rates, and working slowly) and my mother had said no. So this was his way of punishing me for usurping his birthright. And he was never sorry about that, either.

I can’t think of a single time he’s ever apologized or taken real responsibility for his actions.

And I could go on, but I think you can get the idea.

He was always way to big for me to fight growing up. He was only 4 years older, but I was always tiny for my age.

I’m not a fighter. Never have been even when I was a kid. I don’t know how, but somehow I managed to get into my first “fight” when I was 22 or 23.

But that night, I really did want to harm him. Especially when we are having this surreal conversation where he is divorced from any feelings of remorse for his actions. But in the end, I just told him to fuck off. While violence may be personally satisfying, it really doesn’t solve anything.

My brother is just an amateur, my father was a pro. That man was sick. Besides molesting his daughters, beating his wife and us kids, and psychologically abusing us, he also lived in some sort of fantasy world where he imagined that others could read his mind so he would punish us for things which he had thought but never said.

You could do something which you’ve always done, and suddenly would get beaten for it.

Or be woken up at night with him screaming at you for something he dreamed you had done.

My father told me about his molesting my sisters. I was 13 and my oldest sister was 15. He was the victim, of course, and my sister in the wrong. The begs the question of course, not only why would someone molest his daughters but also describe what he had done to his son

My mother was unable to protect us, and was severely depressed from the time I was 8 or 9. A classical battered woman in an era, religion and family which oppressed and degraded women. I was a witness to the violence, and it didn’t surprise me that one of my siblings was the result of a marital rape, but I just recently found out that my father had forced my mother to get down on her knees and lick his shoes.

She was hurting so badly that she attempted suicide a couple of times. She would hurt herself, once by pouring boiling water on her hand. All of this was discussed matter of fact in the house, without any emotions or indication that something was terribly, terribly wrong.

His kids are grown now. He started early and I’m really late so there’s 26 years difference between his oldest, a son and my youngest. I last saw the son when he was 4, and I’ve never met his daughter.

They recently moved into my mother’s house. They were originally going to move without telling their mother where. They haven’t told my mother very much about their family life, but from what little they say, it seemed that they only had each other for support. Really sad.

It’s not a trivial process. For one thing, I didn’t have a clue what a healthy environment looks or feels like, so I’ve had to study a lot.

And the years of counseling. Growing up where the people who are supposed to protect you are the ones abusing you inevitably leaves issues. That you have issues is a given, the question is how to deal with them.

I used to be terrified that I would do something similar to my children, that maybe I would cause even a fraction of the pain which I’ve had to endure. I would take videos of us being happy in case it wouldn’t last.

I’ve finally getting the understanding that I won’t damage them. I think you can see the security which Beta-chan has.

A natural tendency is to overcompensate. Since I grew up with insanely strict, completely inflexible rules, it would be natural to want to not set limits. But that’s not healthy, and this is where studying books and talking to lots of people has helped on learning what is reasonable.