Only now, at age 25, am I beginning to understand my family. Maybe that's common for a lot of people. I guess it's hard to get any perspective until you've moved out and started your own life.

But's it's only been in the last few years that I've begun to understand my brothers and sisters. I have three half-siblings, Mike, Candy & Eric. They are all about 30 years older than me, they are all around the ages that most of my friends' parents are now.

When I was growing up Mike, Candy & Eric were already adults with families and jobs and homes. They were really like aunts and uncles rather than siblings and this obviously didn't provide for close relationships with any of them. Now, I am adult myself, with a life and jobs and a home and I feel like I'm meeting them for the first time all over again.

However, the thing that seperates all of us the most is not age but rather the completely different ways in which we were raised by our father. Mike, the oldest, was born when my father was in a German POW camp during WWII. My father came home when the war ended to a son he had never met and a wife that he hardly knew in the first place. From what I've gathered, through conversations with Mike & Eric and with my father is that he and his first wife, Helen, did not have a good marraige, even though it lasted 25 years.

I've heard over and over that there was an acute lack of love in the family. I've heard that my father was very strict, often punishing my siblings with mild physical abuse. I've heard that their mother, Helen, was a cold and controlling woman.

Later, after the divorce and after the kids were grown up and out of the house, Candy went to law school and Mike & Eric went to work for my father who, at the time, owned a large steel manufacturing company in Atlanta. I've heard that it was a mistake for Mike & Eric to work for my father as they already had numerous emotional issues with him and working under him made these all the more prevalent, creating a lasting future of anger and blame and resentment.

My father met my mother when he was 55 years old. My mother was 38. I think that she was the first woman that my father ever had a loving relationship with. She had never had a child and desperately wanted to, so along came me. My father constantly says that the biggest difference between me and my siblings is that I was born out of this loving relationship.

But now, right now, is when all of these people in my life collide. The four of us, no matter how different we all are, share the same father and he is dying. We all want different things from his life and from his death. We each imagine a life without him in a different way.

So far, I am the only who has dropped everything to be here. But in some ways, I have more at stake than they do. I've already lost one parent, am about to lose another and I have only had 25 years with the man compared to the 50 some-odd years they have each had. Don't martyr yourself, my brother Mike says. But how can he possibly understand when he has neither lost a parent, nor taken care of a dying one?
12:12:22 PM     comment []