Didn't get a lot of sleep last night, remembering a comment my brother made eons (okay, more than five and less than ten years) ago. It wasn't distress that kept me awake, but a strange, unfamiliar sense of the utterly inexplicable.
Had been skimming through Colin Tipping's Radical Forgiveness (a remarkably good book with a remarkably bad title that doesn't begin to convey what it's about). There, in the margins, was a comment Peter made during an incredibly priceless hour of joint, sibling-to-sibling counseling. I'd asked how it happened I'd missed a family meeting where he sought to make amends to Mim & Mom for wrongs he'd done to them.
I learned about the meeting many years after it happened, after sharing with Mom my sadness he'd never shown any remorse for any of the things he'd done. "Oh, yes, he did," Mom answered. "No, I hoped he would, but he never has," I replied. "Sure, he did," she reiterated. "Remember, that meeting with Mim & Peter when he told us how sorry he was for anything he'd done that might have hurt us."
It was clear from her voice, her attitude that Mom clearly remembered this important get-together with her oldest child. In spite of a sinking feeling in my stomach, I went on, "Mom, close your eyes. Relax. Remember the meeting with Peter. Look around. Am I there?"
"Oh," she said, opening her eyes wide, "You're not!"
Until that moment, it had never dawned on her to notice that I wasn't included, that his words were just directed to the two of them. Intentionally, it turned out.
Sitting with the objective facilitator, I asked about that meeting. Had I been asked & unavailable?
Reading those words written in the margin of a book, I was suddenly back in the moment, seeing Peter's eyes open wide with surprise, as he replied, genuinely stumped over my question, "I had done things that hurt Mim & Mom. I never did anything that injured you."
In his memory, he had virtually no contact with me. Ever. As he explained to the counselor, life in our household was so awful, he spent as much time as his friend's house as he could, as did both Mike & Mim; once they graduated from high school, each lit out on their own - he went off to college, Mike joined the Navy, and Mim became a live-in nanny. So, he couldn't have harmed me, because he wasn't in my life.
That set me back on my heels, at least momentarily. Gathering my stunned thoughts, I replied, "Yes, you did all leave after high school. But you all came back. Continually!"
One look at his face & I could see - all those frustrating (to me) returns of the natives never happened. That spoke volumes. His answer was far more enlightening than he could ever have imagined.
It is impossible to have a conversation with someone who simply doesn't remember what happened. This wasn't the sort of thing that one person remembers one way & another interpreted totally differently.
All of our family's friends knew that Mike bunked at our house when he wasn't off on his world travels, just as he worked for Dad between overseas jaunts & for several years after he married. They knew that Mim headed home when she had time off from her jobs, whether it was up the road or in Philadelphia where she was a housemother at Girard. They knew that Peter stayed for months at a time at 4501 Woodland Road.
Yes, they all lit out early in their adult lives, but they all came back. But Peter remembered none of that. To him, he'd left & never looked back, let alone returned.
That was what kept me awake all night; not the thought, "How could he not remember?" but about how he was almost right - it wasn't that he wasn't in my life, but that I wasn't in his. Ever.
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