Dear Cary,
Early this year, one of the greatest bright spots in my life occurred: I became an uncle. After 10 years of bleak family moments, we all finally had a moment of renewal. My older brother called me (I'm an expat and haven't actually seen the munchkin) 'round about 4 a.m. EST: "God, he's beautiful."
Four months later my brother split with my sister-in-law. They were effectively, though never officially, married -- 15 years together, since high school. OK bro, you had a son and split with your girl four months later. As he put it to me on the phone, "There's no way people aren't going to think I'm an asshole." Right: People are going to think you're an asshole. And the thing is, Cary, I sort of think he's an asshole too, and I'm wondering whether I should.
To be clear, there was no plan on my brother's part to run when a child appeared, and he's determined to be there in general. He loves his boy and loves the woman in question, but is no longer in love. The breakup was apparently mutually agreed upon and (more or less) without rancor. They went through what I suspect is very common: There were problems in the relationship and when the pregnancy occurred, they thought a baby would solve those problems. They didn't plan it, but neither of them agrees with abortion, and they thought, "Well, this will bring us closer together." It didn't work, apparently -- the baby made it more clear that they were not compatible.
Fine.
But my brother is leaving this woman with a 5-month-old child. Having never actually had a sister, she's the only person I'll call sister. She's intelligent, attractive and a good time out. I love her dearly. But now she's an early-30s single mom and her life prospects just took a serious nosedive -- because of my brother.
A central principle of modern Western life is that you ought to do what you think is self-sensible in relationships. Be yourself, right? "Staying together for the kids" is not sensible -- for you or for the kids. But maybe sometimes you should hang in a little longer than you want to. Maybe my brother should stick in living as a family for, say, two years, if only to help the mother during the most tiresome times. Maybe sometimes, "staying together for the kids" makes a little sense.
He and I have been through a lot together -- watching a father kill himself with alcohol. "I will not be that man and that includes not being trapped in a relationship I don't want" is a guiding principle for both of us. I understand that motive and I agree that an unhappy marriage is worse than a divorce. But fuck, divorcing when you have an infant? Is my brother an asshole?
TM
Dear TM,
OK, let's call your brother an asshole. What difference does it make what you call him? You love him, right? He's your brother. You've been through a lot. You've probably sat up together nights worrying about your dad, and would he make it, and why'd he do what he did, and wouldn't it have been better if he had been able to stop drinking. And there were probably times you thought this time he was really going to stop, and he got your hopes up, and then he blew it again and again until you really thought you couldn't take it anymore, and then when you'd lost all sympathy for him he got gravely ill, and then what can you do, you can't call a gravely ill man an asshole, so you had to have sympathy for him at the end and watch him die with a sickening blend of rage and love and helplessness, asking why did he have to die like that when there was help available, when there were people who loved him who were willing to do anything for him if he would just stop drinking.
So you and your brother are bonded in the deepest possible way by watching your father drink himself to death. And as brothers I imagine you cut each other a lot of slack, because you both know the deep wounds that that event left in you. And you are both committed to not making the same mistake your dad made, and to not being victims, and to not being unhappy. And all that makes sense. And none of us can judge what kind of personal hell your brother lives in as a result of trying to be a good man but being prone to the demons just like your dad was and maybe just like you are as well. We've all got demons and we do the best we can and sometimes we really fuck up and we're assholes. And who can know what we're going through, how hard it is, how many times we've pounded the wall with our fist or buried our face in a pillow at night. He's your brother, so you also know he didn't do this to harm people. He's your brother, so you may know that he's selfish and has trouble seeing the big picture, and maybe he doesn't have such great impulse control and maybe he's prone to fits of moodiness and helplessness and hopelessness, and maybe he's also a bit of a dreamer and a charmer and has an outsize genius for a good time, and maybe he wants more out of life than a 9-to-5 job with healthcare and benefits like your dad had, because look what good that did, and look what good it did your mom to stay in a relationship that gave her nothing but crying time, so he's not going to stop pulling the lever on the slot machine because you never know, a happy life has got to be possible.
So even though it's about the dumbest, most assholic thing to do to leave your lover with an infant child after 15 years of implied common-law till-death-do-us-part, that's what he did, knowing full well he'd be called an asshole for it. So let's go ahead and call him an asshole and get that over with because there's work to be done. There's a kid who doesn't know about any of this; he just knows he's alive and he's hungry and he needs to know that the world isn't going to come crashing down around his head every 15 minutes when another of the "adults" around him gets it into his head to seek his bliss in Idaho.
So what do we do? And how do we do it?
Kids can grow up well under all kinds of circumstances. It's about how you treat the kid and who the kid is. The last thing you want to do is tell this kid his dad's an asshole. So let's just pretend that everything we're saying the kid is hearing. Now who is his daddy and why did he leave? He left because he had to. We don't know why. He had to go do something really important, and he loves us and cares about us but he couldn't live with us because he had to do something. And we love him and he's a good man and he loves us and that's just the way it is, because we don't understand everything even though we're adults and maybe it seems like we do. We don't. We don't really understand even how an electronic ignition works, or why sometimes you get "404" errors. We don't know why some toys are lame and others are your favorite. We don't know why some kids are bad and some kids are good. We don't know much, except we love you and things are going to be OK.
Something like that. You get what I'm saying? I'm saying get real and painfully honest but don't fill the kid's head full of hateful garbage.
And beware of this, too: Intense disapprobation can be an intoxicant. You can get high calling people assholes, that is. You can get high and feel powerful talking trash. That's one reason we do it. It makes us feel better. But that doesn't make it useful or productive. Except for getting stuff off your chest and moving on. So yeah, maybe your brother is an asshole. Now help me move this crib.
Like I said, the important thing is, How can the people around this child help the child, and help the child's mother?
One thing you could do, like you said, is urge your brother to stick around for a while in some capacity. Maybe not living in the same house with them, but nearby. Urge him to get a job and make some money and contribute to the well-being of his child and the child's mother. And other people can help too. It doesn't have to be a formal arrangement. People just need to be there and help out. And your brother can leave his new girlfriend at home when he visits, and if he doesn't have enough sense to do that on his own, you can tell him, gently, that he's being an asshole again, and to leave the girlfriend at home. And when he comes over he can bring something for the boy. And the boy's mom can welcome him as if he's someone she likes, not as if he's the shit-head asshole who left his infant child for reasons typically unfathomable and unforgivable.
I mean, we're going to have these rotten thoughts when people do rotten things. But we're going to try to do what's right anyway. We're going to try to be the adults in the situation, now and for the next 20 years.
What? You want more?
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