A few years ago, I was confronted by what felt like an impossibly heart-wrenching situation: I found out that my older brother was hitting our mother.
When my parents decided to adopt my brother, they knew that he would have challenges. I’m not sure exactly what my parents were told when they agreed to adopt him, but I do know that it was clear that he was not a normal, healthy baby. In fact, when my parents arrived at the adoption agency to pick up my brother, the agency told them that if for whatever reason they decided after having him at home for a few weeks that they weren’t able to or decided that they didn’t want to care of him, they could bring him back to the agency. They would understand if they didn’t want to take on what would be a challenging child to raise. “Once we took him home, though,” my mom said, “he was our baby! How could we possibly take him back and give him away? There was absolutely no way we could do that!”
My brother was under the care of a psychiatrist, and on medications of various kinds, for his entire life. He had developmental delays (e.g. he never learned to crawl and wet his bed until he was over 4) and allergies to common foods (including things that many people are now finding they have intolerance for, like cow’s milk and cane sugar). He had learning disabilities — a speech therapist helped him get over his stutter and learn how to speak, he had difficulty processing information visually (like me, he’s primarily a kinesthetic and auditory learner). He was diagnosed as bipolar and manic depressive and my parents were told he had OCD. He graduated from a public high school, but attended a school for children with learning disabilities for most of his childhood. In many ways, he was really competent and able: he drove a car, he lived in an apartment on his own from the time he was 20. I always thought he had a better memory than I did — he could recall events from our childhood in incredibly vivid detail. And he was certainly the most persistent person I have ever met.
After my father passed away and I had helped my mom move from the house I grew up in to an independent living retirement center, my brother started spending more time with her. In some ways, it was really good for my mom to have him around to keep her company. My mom always thrived in situations where she could help others. She has always genuinely enjoyed taking care of others. And after her husband of nearly 50 years passed away, she was devastated and lonely. She seemed to welcome having her adult son effectively share her apartment with her.
As time passed, though, my brother became increasingly demanding of her. Six years ago, he started dialysis treatments, and after he started staying at our mom’s place, he made her wake up every day at 4am and get dressed and walk him out to the front of the building where the dialysis transportation service would pick him up. He needed her to walk with him, he said. And he wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. He also became more psychologically unstable. At 3am one night about two years ago, when for some reason I hadn’t turned off my phone or put it in airplane mode like I usually do, my cell phone rang. It was my brother. He told me that he had woken up angry and had hit our mother. At the time, I was an eight hour drive from my mom’s place, so I asked him to put her on the phone. I asked her what had happened, and she told me that he had hit her. She said she wasn’t hurt. He was very upset, and I stayed on the phone with him until he calmed down. I suggested that he try to get back to sleep and call his psychiatrist in the morning. He called 911 a few hours later, and when he got to the hospital, he requested a psychiatric evaluation. I felt comforted by his awareness that it wasn’t okay for him to hit his mother (who had turned 90 a few months before). I also felt comforted to know that he was being evaluated by professionals who would adjust his medications.
So, three months later, when I came home from the gym and listened to a voicemail message in which my mom’s voice was just a whisper because she had laryngitis, and I heard her say, “Ric, stop hitting me. Ric, stop beating me,” and heard him respond by saying, “I have to beat you because I’m so angry!” I was completely stunned and, of course, devastated. This time, I immediately called 911 and the front desk at the retirement facility where my mom lived, asking them to get her out of her apartment so she would be safe. When the police arrived, and asked her if he had hit her, she said, “no”. I will never know whether she said that because she was trying to protect my brother, or if she said “no” because she didn’t remember being hit by him.
I hated being in a position of deciding to separate my brother from our mother. I felt guilty for coming between my mom and her son, and for making it impossible for my brother to see his mother. Who was I to step in when my mom was saying that she was okay? What right did I have to come between a parent and her child, or a man (particularly a disabled man) and his own mother? I worried that maybe I wasn’t making a rational decision, but was instead acting out of some latent frustration I had with my brother for taking up so much of the oxygen in our home, and so much of our parents’ attention, when we were kids. But I also knew that I needed to protect my mother. She was 90 years old. She had Alzheimer’s. She wasn’t in a position to make rational decisions or to take care of herself.
Because of all my emotional entanglements in the situation, I sought the advice, perspective, and counsel of people who weren’t so emotionally caught up in it. I spoke with a unit in the local police department that helped homeless and disabled people. The police officers there were already really familiar with my brother because of the number of times he had called 911 for one reason or another. I explained the situation to a few close friends and heard their perspective. And, fortunately for me, my mom’s sister had received a similar call from my mom a few days before. Fortunate, not because my mom had to experience being hit by her grown son more than just the two times I knew of, but fortunate because my aunt understood the situation and was able to help me navigate all the emotional turmoil and practical realities of getting my mom evaluated by a neurologist so that I could get conservatorship of her. Fortunate because she was around to reassure me that we really did need to file a restraining order against my brother so that he would not be able to have contact with our mom.
I like to think of myself as someone who is loving and compassionate. I like to see myself as someone who shows up for other people when they need support. And yet there I was, turning away from my own brother. There I was, turning him away. What, I wondered, did that say about me? Not long after the restraining order was filed, my brother somehow got himself into a convalescent facility. I heard from the social worker there that he had angry outbursts with the nurses on staff. He and I never spoke again after I filed that restraining order. I sent him photos of himself when he was a child, and photos of our family. He wrote to me once, telling me that he was enjoying looking at the photos, and asking if he could borrow money from me. And the truth is, I found it easier to feel compassion toward him when I wasn’t interacting with him.
My brother had so many challenges, so many struggles throughout his life. I remember when he was a kid and would get so frustrated that he would beat his head against the wall. I have seen his rage — toward himself and toward others — and I have seen his pain.
I don’t know why my brother became violent and abusive toward our mother. And I never will. He’s now in the ICU at a hospital. His liver and kidneys are failing. He’s in respiratory failure and his thyroid isn’t functioning. I just signed papers to have him moved into hospice. For my part, I’ll just continue to believe that there was something wrong with his medications or the thoughts he was believing that caused him to act out in the way that he did. Sometimes … we all get confused.
I send him my love and wish him peace and ease.
