Targets of Our Rage

I’ve been thinking recently about grief and about heartbreak and about how a heart does not break all at once, like a glass dropped on a hard tile floor, but over and over and over again. The breakage of a material object is a one-time event. (Okay, maybe you glue it back together and drop it again, but the events are still each singular.) An aching, breaking heart may stop hurting for a while, but new pangs can come unexpectedly, sharply, deeply, at any time. That was one thought. Another is how much anger can be generated by grievous heartbreak, anger which so often has nowhere to go. I might feel anger toward a late friend or relative who “didn’t take care of himself” and/or with whom a relationship had suffered and not been repaired, but if I allow myself to feel angry with the dead I feel guilt on top of grief and anger. So either I add guilt to grief or repress anger. At present I grieve and fear for the future of my country, and there is anger there, too. Third thought: What I’m thinking now is that the anger of fear and grief can be repressed but not done away with by repression, and that means anger – even rage -- can erupt (like the pangs of grief that come on unexpectedly) at any moment. And it WILL find a target. The target will not be appropriate to the feeling at all, but the feeling – justifying itself – cannot be stopped. And so these days we Americans are like blindfolded archers, shooting arrows of rage in all directions. And if that doesn’t grieve you, I don’t know what will.

In a Holding Pattern

I’ve been searching for a way to describe my feelings, and all I can come up with is that I feel I’m in a holding pattern. Not waiting for any big event, just for clearance to land — finally! — and get on with ordinary life. Waiting for a return to normality, that is — which has enough problems and complexities and challenges of its own, God knows. I don’t kid myself about that. Normal life has enough craziness for anyone. But living in a country at war with itself, as we do now, goes beyond normal craziness (and I don’t mean that to be taken as an oxymoron) and into outright daily insanity. It either exhausts the heart or drives it underground, into hiding, but meanwhile we cannot afford to check out or let ourselves fall asleep. We still have to keep our lighted, fully equipped, and heavily freighted ships — our lives! — aloft, all parts running and in decent working order, and we have to remain alert and engaged and keep sending and receiving signals —. . 

So for now it’s the holding pattern and the quiet, sometimes desperate hope (one must maintain hope) that fuel reserves will hold out and that we will, one day, walk out on solid ground again. 

Sibling Estrangements

About 15 years ago, give or take, one of my sisters and I had an argument that led to a year-long estrangement. Eventually we got over it. (While we were not speaking, I don’t think my parents knew we were not.) Sometime between then and now, my two sisters had an estrangement that went on a considerable length of time. The igniting factor in the first instance was a disagreement over children’s behavior; in the second instance, there was dog behavior involved. 

How we raise our children, how we raise our dogs, how much attention we expect brothers and sisters to pay to our kids and pets and what kind of behavior we expect them to accept from those kids and pets – these are some of the knottiest issues between adult siblings, probably more problematic than money issues.

But money is sometimes involved with kids, too.

My father had two brothers, an older and a younger. The oldest of the three boys (their sister died shortly after World War II) had no children. When the youngest child of the youngest boy, a son, married and was looking for a house to buy, his uncle, recently remarried after the death of his first wife, offered to sell him the house he had lived in for years. My uncle’s price for the house was less than what he would have asked on the open market, but his sister-in-law, my cousin’s mother, thought our uncle was asking too much and thereby taking advantage of his nephew. What began as a family gesture of goodwill gave rise to bad blood that went on year after year of my two uncles not speaking to each other.

My father tried several times to play peacemaker, but it must have taken a miracle to get those two brothers back on speaking terms before one of them died. All those years wasted!

Two men we know, brothers, were estranged for several years, and it seemed as if they would never acknowledge one another again. Their father died before their rapprochement took place. Happily for their mother, she lived to see it. They are now business partners, all the bitterness and rancor buried with the hatchet.

Then there is the question of how much emotional support siblings expect of one another. When expectations don't match up, it can make for resentment.

But really, what is “unforgivable” between siblings? Is there anything? The long silences are hard on everyone, and it is never only the two feuding parties in the family who are affected. Whether or not other family members take sides or make every effort to remain neutral, there is a lot of collateral heartache. 

Is it any wonder people from different backgrounds have trouble getting along?