Mother, Brother, and SIL

Yesterday I took the train to visit my mother, with the idea of re-borrowing the Cadillac I'd borrowed last fall, now that it has had some repairs made. Maybe I can give Wife back the car I'm borrowing from her. (Or maybe I could, you know, get my ass in gear and buy a new car.) Mother has been storing the car with Brother and SIL, so she asked them to drive it out and in the end we all had pizza together for dinner. And I suddenly understood something I had not consciously known before.

I actually don't like Brother.

I mean, I'd known for years that we have nothing in common. When we strive to make conversation, as often as not it ends up revolving around the old '60's sitcoms we used to watch together in reruns after school and before doing our homework, back when we were kids in, say, the 1970's.

But I had always resisted understanding that I simply don't like him, for a couple of reasons. Partly, I remembered when we were both little and I thought of him as my cute baby brother. And partly there is a strong (if unstated) prohibition in my family against saying or even thinking ill of a family member.

Maybe there are other reasons too. But I found myself resenting that he and SIL spend so much more time than I do with my mother, even as they live a lot closer than I do. And I detected myself feeling defensive towards them both — I mean Brother and his wife SIL. So once dinner was done (quite late) I went straight to bed rather than sit up to talk to them. What's more, all the comfortable sofas in my mother's house are in the public rooms; so after dinner, when Brother and SIL said they were on their way home (but, typically, showed no inclination to stand up) I chose to sleep on the hard floor of my mother's study rather than to lie down — vulnerably, as it were — on one of the sofas.

I never knew this before, and I don't know anything I'll do differently now that I do. (Also I am struggling to stay awake.) But it's interesting.

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