Frustration's End
In 2013 when our mother dropped dead, I was 23, my sister was 18, and my brother was only 16.
I was married, and that event showed me that I couldn't be. If I was in the middle of my life, I needed to make some drastic changes, and now neither of my parents had lived to see 50.
My sister, thankfully, was orphaned only after becoming a legal adult. That could have been a whole mess, and of course it was another whole mess, all of us treating her like she'd been raised when she and all of us needed more of Mom's mothering.
And my brother was a boy with a father more likely to burden him than support him, which has happened again and again and will continue to happen. My brother will never cut him off, as have the rest of us who were children within his violent grasp, under his creepy leer.
There is so much I was once frustrated with my brother for not knowing, for not learning, for fearing unnecessarily.
But losing my mother didn't only end my marriage, it changed my whole life, my whole approach to relationships, my whole understanding of how I was treating the people who were in my life for an undetermined and undeniably FINITE amount of time.
I had already begun to taste the freedom in personal responsibility, and then I was served a triple helping of responsibility, and decided to fall in love with eating it.
People often think I have lots of experience with psychedelics or kink, or that I have more scholarly education than my BA in Psych. The truth is that I used all the pain, bewilderment, insanity, and confusion that was served to me through my life circumstance. I leveraged my experiences to understand how I and the world work, rather than ruminating in self-hatred or hatred of life. I held loosely to what I was taught, and firmly to what I observed.
I allowed tragedy to bring me into intimacy with reality, when it is our culture's practice to disassociate from pain and ruminate in delusion about how our desires reflect what "should" be happening, and the unpleasantness of an experience shows that something is "wrong."
I worked my way out of frustration with my brother and came to rightness with serving him where he was at.
I let my heart break each time I do what I wish our mother was here to do, each time I teach him what he might have learned from her, with her. I notice the way my frustration is an easy outlet for the buildup of grief, the way resentment feels natural and easy, while loving action requires me to be in present relationship with my grief.
I could justify all manner of resentment. My brother is past his mid-twenties now. Oh, wouldn't it be nice to blame him for his fears and limitations, rather than feeling and seeing the gaping black hole of tragedy that is their source? Wouldn't it be easy to condemn him and tell him he needs to figure it out?
It would be easy, if I could forget. If I could forget what we all went through, what's missing here that might have been. If I could forget that I don't know how long I have to love him, forget the pangs of regret and anguish I feel at refusing any service or opportunity I had to love someone who is no longer in my life.
If I NEEDED to forget these things, if I needed to disassociate from my own pain, my own memories, I would absolutely need to resent and blame him. Being by his side in love and teaching him through a template requires that I am willing to remember, willing to feel, willing to see how and why he was limited, and willing to accommodate the limitations those memories present to me.
This time that looked like me crying in the bathroom of a car dealership after he bought his new car all on his own. The help I offered was merely emotional, his independence, as usual, flourishing when I am able to be present with him in what IS.
It's hard to say what those tears are really about anymore, all of it jumbles together, so I let it be a somatic experience. Cry it out, dry the tears, get back to the celebration. It's only when I won't cry them that the frustration and resentment arise again.
It's only when I'm intimate with truth that I can devotionally love others.