Our Family Conference

Monday, October 13, 2008 -- 6:50 PM   This has been an awful week, and it is only Monday.   Today was our family confrontation -- in other words, it was our family conference.  I did not feel too good going into it, and felt even worse coming out.   It started out nicely enough.  All of us talked about our childhoods, how close we were, or not, to one another.  My sister talked about how she went to New York University for one year, staying with our grandparents.  She would like to have gone there longer, but our mother made her come home.   My brother said that while our sister was gone, he was more or less given the responsibility of looking out for me.  None of us liked our home situation.  My brother tried getting away from it by going to a seminary for two years, in order to become a priest.  He then decided that was not for him, and returned home.   I could not remember too much interaction with my sister, because there was an 11-year age difference.  She was the oldest of my siblings, my brother was the middle one, and I was the youngest.   My brother and sister each admitted trying to get away from home -- primarily away from our mother -- as soon as possible.  Each of them said they tried to figure out how to get me away from home as well.  That is not how I remembered it, but I was not prepared to say anything yet.   Escape for my sister meant getting married and then moving out of state.  For my brother, it meant getting married and moving to Colorado.  There again, they each admitted that I was "stuck" at home.  Each time someone left, I felt abandoned.   We discussed what occurred when my mother was in the hospital dying.  I visited her one night, went outside into the rain, and got in my van.  I sat there and cried for a while.  I then went home and tried to cut my wrists.  The girl who was helping me at that time, saw me in that situation, and removed all the knives and other sharp things from within my reach.   I said that even though that girl was less than half my age, I had fallen in love with her.  I knew my family did not like that.  She was like a breath of fresh air in my life, or a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.   After mom's death, I flew to Colorado to be with my family during the Christmas holidays.  My brother and sister wanted me to stay there, but I want to go back to Virginia because I felt that was my home.   It was in 1996 that I began using drugs.  I have already written about that part of my life, so I will not repeat it here.  I was on crack cocaine, for more than a year before my family found out and talked me into moving to Colorado.  I told my therapist that my family "dumped" me in a nursing home for about a year.  I also said that I was able to find someone in the nursing home with which I used drugs.   My brother and sister insisted that they had not "dumped" me in a nursing home, but there had been no other place for me to go.  I disagreed with that, but was not in the mood to start an argument at that time.   I asked my brother why he came to visit me in the nursing home almost every week for a year, and had then stopped seeing me almost entirely once I got out of it.  He said that he had seen me in the nursing home as a way of showing me his support.  That was news to me, because I had never heard that before.   As our session was nearing an end, I asked my brother and sister, what had happened to the money they had gotten from the sale of our house.  My sister quickly said, "We split that."  I said it had been my understanding that they were going to put that money into some type of trust for me.  My brother said that was not the case, and I knew better than to think that.   I said, that was not the way I remembered things to be, and thus began our first real disagreement.  My brother asked if I had expected them to give me the money so that I could go out and buy more crack cocaine.  I said no, but I did not expect them to spend it either.   My brother stood up, as we were preparing to leave, and said that he had told me if I was lonely, I should start going to church, join a book club, or join a writer's club.  I angrily told him that may have been what he would have done, but I did not like anything along those lines.    I am glad the session ended there, because I was beginning to get quite angry with my brother.  It had not been my intention to go to that meeting and have it end in some type of a fight.   The session finally ended, and each of us left to go home.  I did not speak to either my brother or sister as I left the building.  At least they cared enough about me to go to the meeting, but I came away from there with a bitter taste in my mouth and a sense of having accomplished little.   The three of us agreed to try and meet on a monthly basis, and continue working on my problems.  My brother said he would be there, unless there was too much snow for him to get through.   I am still not happy with the outcome of the family conference.  Maybe things will turn out better next time.