Ian

 

            A few weeks ago, my girlfriend and I went to my home for the weekend.  I do this every now and then because it gives me the opportunity to see my family; in particular, it lets me spend time with my brothers.

            While we stood around talking about nothing in particular, I happened to notice my little brother, Ian, making an odd little motion with his hands.  He was moving them into each other, back and forth, over and over.  The tips of his fingers matched up almost perfectly, pinky to pinky, thumb to thumb, and everything in between.  He continued to do this for a long time, the motion not appearing to be a conscious thought, but rather like the engine of a car turning in order to keep everything in motion.

            “What was he doing with his hands?” my girlfriend asks after we’ve separated from my family.

            “I’m not really sure,” I say.  “Sometimes he reminds me a lot of my sister.”

            “Are your parents ever going to tell him?” she asks without needing to clarify any more.

            “I know that was the plan originally, but now…” I trail off for a moment, and sigh before continuing, “I’m not really sure what they plan to do now.”

 

            My sister, Marishka, was four years older than me and it wasn’t immediately apparent to me that she suffered from mental illnesses.  For the first eight or so years of my life, there weren’t really even any signs (to me, at least) that anything was wrong.  She was a good student, and when I was in elementary, I actually hoped I would get placed in her former teachers’ classes.  That feeling didn’t quite make it to junior high though.

            The first time my sister acted out, I was only about eight or nine years old.  My mother worked as an elementary school teacher back then and she had received a gift from one of her students.  It was a candle that sat in a glass container which both stood atop a three-pronged holder.  She got gifts somewhat regularly, but they were all special to her in their own way.  There wasn’t really a gift she ever got to which she didn’t apply some sort of meaning.

            One day, for some probably-small reason, my sister got into a fight with my mom.  At this point, the fights between the two of them didn’t really happen very often, which made what happened seem all the more shocking to me.  I walked upstairs and made my way into my mom’s room.  My strong, single-parent mother was crying as if something terrible had happened.  Near her desk, quickly gathered together in a small pile were shards of glass, the candle a little ways away from them completely shattered.  My sister had destroyed it in their fight.

            I saw how upset my mother was by this, and there was but one thought that immediately went through my head: “She’s never going to get that candle back.”  She could technically buy a new one, but it wouldn’t be the same.  It wouldn’t be that special gift she’d gotten from her student.  And the student, my god, what would that poor student think if my mom let on that the gift had been broken?  You can’t explain that kind of thing to kids and have them possibly fully understand.  I just didn’t get it.  My sister had done something that couldn’t be undone.

            I’m not entirely sure if my mom was having the same thoughts, but it didn’t matter too much to me.  I saw how sad she was.  Saw the effect this sort of fight had on her, and I didn’t want to ever be responsible for that kind of pain.

            See, my mom raised the two of us by herself.  My grandparents were a big help, but for a long time, it had just been my mom.  Back then, the part of me that understood what this meant came from a purely emotional standpoint.  I felt very strongly indebted to my mother, but I didn’t quite know why.  Now, it’s a lot easier to see and appreciate just how difficult it must have been to be in her position.  This is why, even as a kid, I couldn’t imagine ever doing something so damaging to her.

            I have moments every now and then where I get caught up in the heat of arguments; so angry that I can understand the want – sometimes, need – to just throw something.  To shatter whatever I can and let anger get ahold of me the same way it did my sister.

            But I don’t let myself.  I can’t let myself.

 

            A year or two later, my sister acted out again.  Despite being capable of getting all As, she stopped trying sometime when she was in junior high.  For her, school was an oppressive establishment that took away your rights.  I’m sure she believed that to be partially true, but I also know now that she hated going to school because as her obsessive compulsiveness got worse, her desire to perform perfectly also got stronger.  She knew what she was capable of, but if she fell short, it ate away at her.  Trying and failing perfection meant obsessing over what went wrong and how she could fix it and why she didn’t and what it meant for the future and so on.  Not trying at all meant never worrying about why she failed.

            As a kid very concerned with doing well in school, all of this was lost on me.  So when she skipped school for the first time, I was especially affected by the act because of how deceptively she pulled it off.  She had pretended to walk to the bus like any normal day, and waited for my mom to stop watching before changing paths and hiding away.  She was never particularly sneaky in her sneaking, so my mom found out somewhat easily.  That didn’t really matter to me though.  Not only had my sister skipped school for no reason, she had blatantly lied to our mom in the process.

            Again, at the time this wasn’t something I fully understood.  For me, it was categorically “BAD” though, and I didn’t even want her to talk to me afterwards.  “No school skippers allowed!” read the sign on my door in the short amount of time it was up before she angrily tore it down.  The fact that my sign didn’t seem to affect her views on the school skipping just made me even more upset.  I didn’t get why she skipped.  I didn’t get why she didn’t feel bad about it.  I didn’t get how she could keep doing stuff like this to my mom.  I didn’t really get any of it, but I knew I didn’t want to be that person.

            Yes, I skipped school every now and then.  “Mental health days,” I called them.  My mom called them that too, though, because she always willingly called me off.  We both knew it wouldn’t hurt my grades, and I never, never contemplated lying to her about why I wanted to stay home.

 

            On top of my sister’s emotional state getting worse, my mom had recently re-married and we now lived in a new house with a new step-dad.  My step-dad was great to us, but to my sister he was another source of authority and someone who was changing our life.  She did not react well to him.

            Whenever he asked her to do her chores, he wasn’t her real dad.  Whenever he tried to defend our mother and asked my sister not to swear at her, he wasn’t her real dad.  Whenever he interacted with her in almost any way, he wasn’t her real dad.

            Somehow, he managed to stay calm almost every time she yelled at him.  Rarely did he even yell back at her – my mom, for all the hate she took from my sister, didn’t want him fighting back, so he obliged.  One time, though, after a fight he’d had with my sister, I remember hearing him yell in frustration and come pounding up the stairs.  I don’t know what they fought about, but when my mom asked him what happened as the stairs shook under his frustration, he yelled out, “She called me a fucking asshole!”  My quiet, calm, religious, never-would-dare-to-swear step-dad saying that, even as a quote, felt kind of like finding out Santa wasn’t real.

            I wanted to tell him how bad I felt, and how I couldn’t believe how well he handled my sister’s crap.  I wanted to make him realize just how much he really was appreciated.  I was just a kid though, and what I wanted more than anything was just to be away from it all.

            My first little brother was born at the end of fourth grade, and for a long time after, my sister would go through periods of bad times and periods of okay times.  When Leo became old enough that my sister’s bad moments might affect him, I spent more time worrying about how he’d handle them.  Sometimes I would try to take him to my room, or outside the house, or even to my grandparents’.  I didn’t want him hearing the same kind of fighting I’d heard over the past few years.  At a certain point that became unavoidable.

            It was when I was in tenth grade that my family found out my sister was pregnant.  Her boyfriend at the time was very nice and genuinely liked by myself and my family.  He seemed to balance out my sister and help keep her calm when she might have otherwise been fighting.  He also understood what my sister could do to my family and sympathized with us.  He was the kind of helpful, supportive boyfriend you hoped to be some day.

            The child was not his.

            Luckily for everyone involved, my sister understood that she was not ready to raise a child, and the biological father didn’t want a kid yet.  Coupled with the fact that my parents – no longer able to thanks to my mother’s fibromyalgia – had wanted another child, adopting my sister’s kid as their own seemed to be the closest thing to a blessing they would get out of the whole ordeal.

            Of course, something negative had to come out of the situation too, and because of the pregnancy, my sister was no longer able to take the medication that kept her emotions in check and her depression from getting the best of her.  This in and of itself wasn’t the worst part; the worst part came afterwards when she no longer wanted to take her medication.  She’d been off of it for so long that it was much more difficult to get her back to taking them.

            Senior year of high school was somehow one of the best years of my life and at the same time one of the worst.  I had a good group of friends I could hang out with, my classes were going incredibly well, I had teachers and classes that I won’t ever forget… in short, everything about life outside my home was wonderful.

            Coming home every day though, it was a gamble.  I walked through the door and heard my sister arguing with my mother most days.  Except these arguments weren’t the same kind they used to have.  They were even louder.  More violent.

            I went straight to my room most days.  It was the easiest way to avoid them fighting.  A lot of the days, that didn’t help.  My sister yelled loud enough to hear all the way upstairs, and if she broke something or slammed a door or decided to hit something in anger, I heard the crash in my room.  It got so bad that I came to flinch every time I heard a door open or close because I couldn’t tell harmless noise from angry noise.

            I spent a lot of nights at my grandparents’ house that year.

            If friends wanted to come over, I had to “play it by ear” because I never knew if it would be a good day or a bad day.  Usually I had to convince them to do something that didn’t involve coming to my house, without having a good explanation why.  “My sister is bad”?  That didn’t really cut it, and even the implications wouldn’t really explain what I meant.  It was a lot easier to dodge explanation and do something away from my house.  I wasn’t really sure how I could handle this day in and day out.  Shortly after my sister moved in with her new, junky boyfriend, I didn’t have to worry about it anymore.

            Growing up, she had tried to kill herself many times.  The first time was traumatic, the second time was worrisome, and at a certain point her suicide attempts became frustrating.  Part of that was because of the toll it would take on the rest of my family, but part of it was also because I’m pretty sure some part of her knew she didn’t actually want to die.  The attempts were never the kind of shattered-candle acts she couldn’t come back from, they were more just cries for help.

            It’s ironic, then, that when she did manage to get herself killed, she wasn’t even trying.  In fact, she was going through one of her better periods and seemed to be getting things in order.  She was living away from home, she had a new dog, and despite her new boyfriend not being like her old one, she still seemed genuinely happy to be with him.  She trusted him, perhaps just a bit too much.

            One day while the two of them were at their house together, they decided to get high.  Now, my sister had been high before so the act itself wasn’t surprising, but even when she moved on from weed to more powerful drugs, she was never reckless about it.  Then again, I don’t think she ever had someone she trusted quite as much as her new boyfriend.  She knew that whatever they did together, he would keep her safe.  He would protect her.

As best as I understand, when they finally did overdose – fully intending to just get a new high – my sister’s Faithful Protector fell asleep in the other room.  She, meanwhile, became unconscious to the point where she stopped breathing.  I’m not sure what her thoughts were right before it happened, but I don’t think she expected Jason to find her hours later.  A few minutes, maybe.  But not this long.

            As a result, she died in a very “her” fashion – dragging things out and making my family suffer as much as possible.  She laid brain dead in the spare bedroom for two months while my mom and grandma kept her alive, praying she’d wake up.  The last month of the summer before I went off to college was spent watching my mom cling onto a hope that didn’t exist.  Marishka always managed to make situations worse than you thought they could be.

            I don’t want to do that, to die like my sister did.  If I go, I’ll be sure to go quickly.

 

            I see my little brother, Ian – the one who is biologically my sister’s child – and catch traces of my sister in him.  Sometimes he obsesses over small things.  Is he being a perfectionist, or is it something more?  Sometimes he gets really angry when he doesn’t get his way.  Is he being a normal temperamental five year-old, or is he having trouble controlling his emotions?

            Ian is entering Kindergarten in the fall and as he gets closer and closer to starting, he focuses more on what that will mean.  He asks how he’ll make friends, what the schoolwork will be like but the way he asks doesn’t just feel like a curious five-year-old asking about something new and excited – there is a hint of worry in his voice.  Like he has a thought that won’t leave his head.

            My parents try to help make the upcoming transition easier on him by working on math and puzzles and writing.  When he does well, he is incredibly excited; with math especially, he looks forward to learning.  When he tries to write though, he gets frustrated with his own handwriting.  He wants to do better and knows he can but doesn’t quite know how.  Sometimes it’s easier on him to just not write at all.

 

            My mother often tells me she raised me the same way she is raising my brothers and “I turned out just fine.”  I would like to believe that’s true, but I don’t think she realizes something very important: I grew up trying to not be like my sister.  My first little brother saw enough of my sister and has enough of his dad’s character to avoid becoming the kind of child my sister was.  Ian though?  He hasn’t had the bad in his life to show him what it means to be good.

            I see too much of my sister in Ian at times, and it’s painful.  I don’t want him to put my family through the same things my sister did.  I want to see him succeed; to use the talents and knowledge already beginning to show themselves to the most of his ability.  But most importantly, I don’t want him to get himself hurt.

            I just hope he becomes what my mom likes to believe he will, not what I’m scared to death he could become.

 

            The last time I went home for the weekend, my mom and I decided to watch a show together.  Before we started, Ian came in the room and we told him that he’d have to play downstairs until the show was over, a command that doesn’t usually go over too well.  Surprisingly, he obliged and left the room.

            “Huh, that could have gone worse,” I thought to myself.

            About fifteen minutes before the show was going to end, he came in once more.  We told him how much time was left, except to a different result.  He made that growling sort of “ERRRR!” noise kids make when they get upset and before we could try to reassure him he ran out of the room.

            A few seconds later, there was a loud noise.  He slammed the door with all the force a five-year-old can muster and it rang out all the way into my mother’s room.

            Unconsciously, I flinched.  The sound was all too familiar.