Growing Up Tough

The music blared, stifling the emotional waves still pulsating through our bodies. The 2010, maroon red CRV had suddenly become a moving coffin for any kind of brotherly accord or fun. I cranked the volume a few notches higher as we approached the neighborhood where we lived, the thunderous base of Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe’ reverberating through the silence.

I sped home along the familiar road, a straight shot with a 45mph speed limit, probably maxing out at 60mph knowing there were no cops and that I wanted to be with the other passenger for as little time as possible.

The passenger was my younger brother. And he was fuming because I hadn’t picked him up on time from some kind of summer school exam. I was in fact 10 minutes late because I had spent the morning at my friends house.

But the anger wasn’t proportionate for such a short (no doubt potentially annoying) wait. My brother didn’t have anywhere to go in fact.

Yet my brother – we’ll call him Devin – was enraged. He barked at me in the car, seething with anger after I apologized and tried to make a joke of things.       

This in turn began to really irritate me. After all it was only 10 minutes. It was a beautiful summer day. We were both on vacation, he in his last year of high school and I on break after freshman year of college. Yet here we were, at each other’s throats.

I don’t remember as many details as I used to.

We got home and more hot words were exchanged. Car doors were slammed and we both stomped off to our preferred corner of our parent’s house. Our mom was due home in an hour or so. My morning task complete, I settled in to watch a movie.

Then all of the sudden my phone rang. It was my mom. She began berating me for not having picked Devin up on time.

I explained to her the circumstances and protested at such a big deal being made over 10 minutes on a completely schedule-free day. She somewhat agreed, perhaps realizing she was simply relaying a teenager’s upset without properly mediating. I hung up.

But this phone call had set something in motion within me. I was now furious for myself. Not that I wanted revenge or anything like that. I was sick and tired of the emotional disproportionality so characteristic of our family’s interactions. Especially between myself, my brother and my mom.

This discord was mainly because Devin had been diagnosed by a child psychiatrist with a ‘Mood-Disorder’ (DSM vagary FTW) at about the age of 7 or 8. He was prescribed medicine, which upon my later investigation, were some type of amphetamines.

He went from being a little kid who had trouble sitting still in church or school, who didn’t quite know when to ‘turn it off’ to being prone to frequent, full-blown rage attacks and outbursts by the time he was in middle school.

This deeply affected his social and educational lives, as he was moved around schools and put into special classes for learning disabilities and misbehaviors. He was told by a special education teacher at one point that he would never be able to read (he now holds a Bachelor of Science in environmental studies btw).

All of this social ostracization and pathologizing - along with misdiagnoses, changed diagnoses and tinkering with medications - had profound negative consequences for him. He also became addicted to video games, playing them incessantly, losing sleep and getting into trouble frequently for them. Overall, these factors made him a violent, unstable personality throughout much of our adolescence.

When the video games were removed from him he would fly into a rage. He would slam his head on walls, scratch his own arms, burst into tears and shrieks. Simple disagreements with any family member could and often would balloon into these episodes – whether or not he would get a haircut, who’s turn it was to watch tv, etc.

Play (both with myself and neighborhood friends) became more difficult and dangerous as he would often fight with little to no provocation. Hangouts would often devolve into blows. He pulled a kitchen knife on me one time during a disagreement over something. Another time we were fighting in the back yard and he took a soda can sized rock in his hand, one that could’ve killed or seriously wounded me, because he had become furious. I experienced a bone-chilling sense of mortal fear on both those occasions.

We shared a room all from childhood through about the age of 11 or so. Most nights he would wait until I fell asleep, then run over and jump on top of me with his knees. I would start awake – shocked, hurt and furious at the blow. I would retaliate and often get in trouble with my parents because I was caught hitting him by the time they got to our room. He would do the same trick with our bunkbeds (I was on the top bunk). He would kick the slats relentlessly until I became so angry I would attack him and get the blame.

My parents, awoken from their own sleep, usually weren’t too interested in adjudicating the issue, much more so in reestablishing calm and getting back to sleep. So I was often ‘caught red-handed’.

Later, in our early teen years around 14 or so, I became so fed up and hurt by this constant turmoil I lashed out at him pretty severely.

On a cold winter’s night my brother and my parents were arguing over something. I can’t quite remember but I believe they were trying to get him to stop playing video games and do homework. Characteristically it blew up to some majorly heated argument nearing blows. I think he may have struck out or did something violent to my mom.

Either way, something triggered me and I snapped.

I leapt off the couch where I had been trying to watch TV in the next room. I barreled towards him. I screamed at him to kill himself. I think I also yelled that we hated him, at least that I hated him, and that he would be better off dead. My mother shrieked in horror at the violence of my words.

The next part that occurred haunted me for a long time after that.

Somewhere in my brother those cruel words landed. I saw something palpable change in his face – he went from being furious to a stupefied, glazed, animal-like look spreading in his eyes. What happened next shocked me.

He ripped open the door that led to our garage and ran straight out into the night. It was sometime in the middle of January in upstate New York – there was a foot of snow on the ground and it was below freezing. He was barefoot and wearing nothing but a tee-shirt and pajama bottoms. And suddenly he was gone, bolting into the inky blackness like a spooked deer.

My dad and I stood there in our den, stunned for a moment. We both went outside. We could just see him disappear into the woods behind a neighbor’s house. My dad called after him. Nothing in response.

I remember a horrible tide of remorse and fear wash over me. Had I just killed my brother? Would he hurt himself or freeze to death out there in the night?

My dad and I quickly slapped on another layer or two of winter clothes and headed out after him. A sense of panic gripped me as now I was desperate to find my brother and make sure that he was safe. We walked for a bit around the perimeter of cul-de-sac to no avail.

I don’t remember much else about that night. I believe my dad looked longer and I went back inside. My brother came back in at some point. How far he went and where, I have no idea.

The only thing I do remember after that was slinking off to my room feeling dejected, shocked and ashamed. My parents didn’t come and talk to me that night. I heard them come in  with my brother. But there was just too much overwhelm from the pandemonium to even begin to know what to say or do. I just fell asleep, and we never addressed it.

I still don’t totally understand what happened that night, but it seems he went into a flight/fight response from a perceived mortal danger.

This ‘Mood-Disorder’ persisted through nearly the end of high school.

The summer before my senior year we took a road trip to Virginia to visit family. The 8-hour trip in our family minivan was always fraught with potential for a fight. But we made it down to VA ok, and the visit was good as far as I can recall. But on the way back up, it hit the fan.

We had made it about half way and we were somewhere on the interstate in Pennsylvania. My hips were extremely tight from constant working out and playing football, causing my knees to be in chronic pain. This always cropped up with I sat down for more than 45 minutes. So by hour 4 of the car ride I was in a good bit of discomfort.

To alleviate this discomfort I needed to stretch my legs out. But as I was essentially full grown at 17 yrs old and being approximately 6’3” I needed to stretch my legs out, up and over my brother, slightly, to rest my leg on the back of the passenger seat head rest. I was like a big L.

This greatly annoyed my brother. I had had some dust on my shoes and it got on him. He began to complain to my parents about me and they in turn told me to take my feet down. I stood my ground, explaining that my knees hurt badly and I needed to stretch my legs. The scene shifted from tolerance to tension back and forth for approximately twenty minutes.

Then my brother began to become more irate. Therefore my parents began to really put the pressure on me to put my legs down, threatening me with some kind of punishment if I didn’t listen(obey).

The pain, the stuffiness of the car, the anger I felt at the unfairness of not being treated with care while my brother railed against me, my parents unquestioningly taking his side (per usual unfortunately) – I snapped.

I put my legs down and spun in the pilot seat to face my brother where he sat across from me. For a split second we eyed each other frozen in ready tension, like two bull ungulates preparing to charge. And then I loosed a punch at him square in the face traveling 75 mph down a highway.

We both pounced at each other. He grabbed my hair and began to scratch and pull. I was bigger and stronger than him (although he’s 1.5 yrs younger, we were similar in size) so I was landing some punches to his body and head. We tumbled into the back seat where my poor, sweet little sister scurried to get out of the way.

Everyone was screaming except me and Devin. We wrestled and jockeyed for position. I was sending blows that hit home. He dug his nails deeper into my flesh and even tried to attack my eyes. This engaged in me a primal sense of rage and I tried to hit him hard to end the fight. I can remember my dad’s voice, high-pitched and hoarse, desperate to get us to stop but helpless as he was still driving.

We tussled in this awful death-lock speeding down an interstate.

Finally, after what seemed like a few minutes, we pulled into a rest stop. We were separated and my brother was rushed by my dad to the bathroom. He had gotten a bloody nose.

I had one as well. I stood off to the side of the car in the parking lot. My sister was wailing; shocked and distressed. I felt exhausted, angry but somewhat satisfied at the feeling of triumph and having exacted some type of justice.

Then my mother rushed up to me in a huff and put her face within a few inches of mine.

“How could you!?”

I started to put forth a protest about the beginning of the conflict. She quickly shut it down. She said something venomous about me being ashamed and grounded. I nod absently, standing there like a prisoner at sentencing.

Somehow, we made it home on the second leg of the road trip under a gloomy cloud of silence.

So these were the roiling undercurrents of my family’s dynamics the summer time dispute with Devin had touched off. All the years of chronic and unresolved shock, fury, stress, confusion and hurt spurred me into action.

After I had hung up the phone with my mom I B-lined it for his room. I knocked on the door and entered. Both of our bodies were taught, unfortunately now being used to the intransigent conflict we’d been in for years. We were both prepared to swing on each other and wrestle to the ground.

But this time it was different. This time I wanted to end.

I got in his face. I didn’t even argue with him anymore, because there was no argument. I simply said as I stood toe to toe with him:

“I’m done fighting with you. I love you. I don’t want to fight with you anymore. Either you fucking hit me right now or we stop. Because I don’t want to fucking fight you.”

Those words hung in the air as we snorted hot air in each other’s faces like two beasts on some prairie.

And then it happened, something cracked or shifted, I don’t know what. But the deadlock of intransigent conflict was broken. We both snapped out of it as if it was a spell.

We hugged and cried and promised to try to make it better. My mom came home, expecting to find us arguing and walked in on the scene. We all were overcome with emotion and hugged, crying more. We all promised to get better moving forward as a family who loves each other and treats each other that way.

Since that day, there have definitely been ups and downs, but the feeling of being stuck in an irrational fever dream and primal conflict has abated. My brother, I can honestly say, is one of my best friends now.

It took years of therapy and many more honest, risky, heartfelt conversations, but we are a much closer family now. We don’t fight and we can disagree about things. It’s not perfect but it is dramatically better. And we’re continuing to evolve as we become more stable young adults.

I also believe that chronic family-relational stress is one of the most insidious and damaging types of stress that there is. The type that my family went through is often overlooked because families have difficulty discussing the issues productively.

Whether it's a false pride (fear of shame), addiction, distraction, emotional illiteracy and/or other variables; chronic stress and violence in relationships is a costly experience to go through. If you have experienced such hurt I highly recommend seeing a qualified therapist you can develop a productive relationship that is conducive to healing.

And if you are or ever were in a situation similar to this, I hope you can perhaps find that there is a liminal space where you can choose to move forward and to step out of the nightmare. It may not have a happy ending like mine, but you can radically choose love and operate from that foundation. You just might be surprised at what happens.