Putting up pictures of my brother

...but only when he was a kiddo

I have been nesting for a few months now. I am finally giving up the transitional and nomadic existence that I knew and embraced for so long. As a tenure-track professor, I am really making an effort to make a home in my new apartment.

It is quite easy to do. The space is spacious with hard wood floors and large ceilings in a lovely brick apartment home on a main street in a historic little town. I have two bedrooms and it’s a fun place to call home.

I have put up pictures of my parents, cousins, friends, my grandmothers, neighbors, and a few of my brother.

However, I only keep pictures up of Jeremie as a baby or child.

This is intentional. I do have a few of him when was older. But those pictures produce some pretty complicated feelings that arise and stir within me.

My brother and I had a tumultuous relationship—to say the very least—growing up and that extended into adulthood. We clashed in personalities and political viewpoints and world view perspectives. We fought constantly and they were nasty ones.

I am quite certain I bugged my brother (I have my theories as to why this is) and I know that he was maddening to me as well. Some of this, certainly, can be chalked up to that we were just incredibly different people and he overly tried to identify with our father and me with our mother.

But our fights are not why I don’t keep pictures of him as an adult in my apartment.

My brother financially abused our mother. She allowed him, as traumatized and wounded as she was, she was simply happy to have him in her life, and to be a grandmother. And never paid her back. He repeated the cycle of how my father treated my grandmother.

And despite being so angry about our father’s death at his own hand, he did the same, even though he had a small daughter. Even though she was at home at the time.

When I look at Jeremie’s face as an adult I see someone who was abusive and selfish. And in many ways, he was.

When I look at Jeremie’s face as a kiddo and baby, I see him differently. Instead, I humanize him and I don’t immediately immediately recall that he was a selfish and narcissistic person, because he is a child in these pictures.

And he doesn’t look happy. Instead, I recall that he was traumatized and sensitive and bullied and never felt accepted and loved, supported, by his father. And he oh-so desperately wanted that.

Adults are often wounded children and, which is to say, emotionally immature and masquerading as grown ups, but there also comes a point where, as adults, we need to do better and become accountable to how we treat others. Where we need to work to heal ourselves for things that may not have been our fault. We can’t (or shouldn’t) ride the bus with that victim card indefinitely because we will hurt others. And also we’ll continue to wallow in our bitterness and self-destruction. And then repeat intergenerational patterns of abuse to those whom we are in relationship with..

I’ve seen this play out in my family and in former friends.

It’s a sad place to be.

And it’s a cop-out for a full-grown adult.

We are responsible, even those of us who don’t have children.

I do feel for my brother. I do pity him.

But in accountability, I also see both he and my father were/could be incredibly selfish people, not because of how they died, but because of they lived and transferred their pain.

But, I also realize—

I’m a woman and it is entirely more culturally and societally acceptable for me to address my emotions and reach out to get mental health help.

The feelings are complicated. And it isn’t just one thing. It is many.

But pictures of my brother as a child tugs at my heart strings and produces sympathy in my heart as I remember that he was raised very differently than I was. As my childhood best friend said, you see those pictures of him as a child and you just want to give him a hug, especially knowing what it is to come.

My mother was six years younger when she had him and she struggled so much with post-partum depression, and I don’t believe was able to be as emotionally available to him as she was me, when we were infants. She also had not yet accepted and learned about my father’s alcoholism yet to teach him differently, as she did with me. We truly were raised by different people, even though they were the same parents.

Almost who knew Jeremie commented on how sensitive he was. I think he was, especially for a guy. They often remark on how impressionable he was and how impulsive. He was all of these things.

But little Jeremie in these pictures, after about middle school, he doesn’t smile. I know he was self conscious because of a tooth that needed to be replaced that was knocked out at a water park, as a boy, but it is more than that.

The look on his face, the expression and the haunted and vacant look in his eyes makes him look…hesitant, sometimes even scared. But, certainly, insecure. Vulnerable. Vigilant. Ill at ease.

I don’t know how to describe it other than that.

You look at the transformation in his face and consider how it has changed, and you wonder, want to question—

What happened to you? What changed? What experiences altered you and what happened in your head to make you look so different?

As my friend says, I hope he’s at peace now, and free from the manic depressive state.

I do too. I believe in my soul that he is.

And it makes me feel somewhat assured that he is finally at rest now. No longer scared, vulnerable, insecure, not getting what he needs, emotionally, invalidated.

When I think about him now, I instead choose to believe that his wounded inner child is whole…that he is accepted, held, warm, secure, safe, and no longer lacking anything, like he clearly was so often in this earthly realm.