My brother keeps popping into my head during the day, when I’m trying to sleep and even into my dreams.
All the news about Sandusky and his victims keep my brother in the fore front of my mind day and night, but that isn't the only thing making me think about him.
The main reason I’m worried about him is him possibly relocating to Oregon. It is too close to Seattle where everything went to hell several years ago. I don’t think it is healthy for him to go back to an area of the country where so many things went so drastically wrong in the not so distant past. I think he needs help that can’t be found in a bottle. I personally do not have a problem with people smoking, having been around stoned people and drunken people since a very early age; I’ll take the stoned people any day! They are much mellower and less prone to violence than drunken people, they just stink more that drunken people.
When he was still a pre-pubescent he was molested by a pedophile. I don’t know how far the abuse went, other than a few passing, small comments, my brother have never discussed it with me. Many years after the abuse, he out cried to my mother while watching some made for TV movie one evening. By this time he was late into his teens and not interested in counseling. My mother called me to tell me about it, and from then on proceeded to broadcast the information to everyone she could find contact information for; Aunts, Cousins, Family, Friends, etc…
Now, one could argue that I also am broadcasting the information; however, I do not use identifying information in my journal so the only people with the knowledge required to deduce identities, are already privy to the information anyway.
I often ponder what could have been different had my brother out cried about the abuse sooner. Maybe he would have gotten counseling, never gotten into drinking and drugs. Maybe we’d still be close and mom wouldn’t have been able to drive a wedge between us?
My brother started using marijuana by high school and graduated into other drugs. As soon as he graduated, he went to Seattle, and that is when I feel I lost my baby brother. I know when he was in Seattle he fell deeper into drugs and other unsavory enterprises. I don’t know much about his life in Seattle, my mother likes it best when everything goes through her, so everything I heard about him was through her and vice versa. Remember, this was 1996, most people had not even heard of email!
He did get married while in Seattle, but my mother told me I was not invited because he would be uncomfortable? Whatever that meant… At this point I did not even have a phone number for my brother so talking to him was impossible. My mother always refused to give us his phone number.
Finally one day, she gave him my number because he needed help (and of course by help, I mean $$). By this time my grandmother was living with my husband and I so they figured we were rolling in money. After that he would call periodically and I would leave messages for him. He was working 6 days a week as a Chef, so his hours were crazy while I had normal hours, so touching base was difficult.
After I hadn’t spoken to him for a while, I got a call from my mother saying that my brother was exhibiting signs of schizophrenia. He was in the right age range for onset of symptoms, and he was talking about getting in trouble from the captain if he didn’t have his reports on the aliens submitted in time? That is the only example of his rambling I can remember, but it was some weird stuff. Mom started calling all around Seattle trying to get police to pick him up or at least do welfare checks, she called state hospitals and god know who else. At this point, I don’t know if she actually made all those calls or just kept calling me telling me she did, because she likes to maintain drama between her kids so she can maintain control.
Once we got him out of Seattle and to Maine, he got better. I was told he was delusional because of the harder drugs he was taking in Seattle, but once he got away from his wife and other bad influences there, he mellowed out.
I saw him in the Bahamas for Spring Break 2008, but never spoke to him again after that. The only good thing that seemed to come out of that trip was that I stopped binge drinking cold turkey.
I haven’t spoken to my mother since March 2009 and as of then all I knew about him now, was that my mother told me he was a severe, yet functional alcoholic as long as you didn’t “let him drink brown liquor”, that evidently is when he got irrational and had a tendency for violence.
I would like to be able to text/email my brother. He moves around quite a bit being a Chef so regular mail is out and he never checks his Facebook when I’ve asked for his number, so…
Well this entry has already gotten much longer than I anticipated, so I’ll have to write a sequel later