June Gloom in July

Saturday, July 30, 2011 Today’s entry is dedicated to my brother, wherever he may be.  

I got some bad news today, the kind that make you want to run home and be with the ones you love.  To bad for me I am thousands of miles away and a border between us prevents me from running home.  I am too much of a coward to actually do anything to myself so instead I turn into a martyr.  My father and mother are devastated; the whole house is in a state of constant worry and nervous tension.  I can sense it through the phone.  I am on the phone with home most of the day and when I am not, I am sleeping.  Finally the sleep has set in and today there’s no room for it.  But I sleep anyways and try to forget that today is real and not just a nightmare. 

My brother was 5 when we took the journey into the U.S.  The family used to call him the “little white mouse”.  He was white with dirty blond hair, green eyes and a pink nose.  Cowboy boot were his favorite thing to wear, he would wear them with anything, even shorts.  Everyone would make fun of him but he didn’t care, he loved his cowboy boots.  One of the few times I remember him wearing sneakers we were running when my mother noticed he had his shoes on backwards.  When she made him aware of the situation he calmly turned to her and said “don’t worry mom I run faster like that”.  My brother often had a way of making you feel like everything would be alright, even when things weren’t.   As he grew older, brother never handled being illegal the same way as me or my sister.  I can’t say our lives were entirely horrible but we did have several hardships in our lives.  Brother could never recover from those hardships.  At an early age he turned to alcohol and drugs to numb his pain.  My parents were devastated and did everything in their power to help him.  He went on yoyo binges and had great stints of sobriety.  I have to say that for a long time he was not my favorite person.  I would often beg my mother to kick him out of the house and be rid of him for good, but how do you ask a mother to give up on their child?  The rational part of me often disowned him as a brother, but even the smallest part of the human me always knew I loved him. 

A few years ago when I was finally ready to let love into my life someone once told me that I could not be with a man unless I was ready to accept him as he was, all of him, with flaws and all.  That if I even had the small inkling that there was something in him that would change after I was with him then I was putting conditions on that person that they might never meet.  At that moment it dawned on me that that piece of advice didn’t just apply to a man I was ready to fall in love with but to all the men in my life.  I had to forgive myself, my father and my brother, and at that moment I choose to love my brother for who he was.  I could not ask him to be something he wasn’t and he was an addict and an alcoholic but he was also a son, a brother, a husband and a father and all those things outweighed the addict.  I know for a fact, because I went through the same turmoil that having grown up in the U.S. as children we were fed a lot of bullshit that we bought into.  “You can be anything you want to be”, “when you grow up if you study hard and go to college you can get a good job and have a good life”, “be like Mike” on and on.  The only disclaimer no one ever thought to include was “unless you’re undocumented”. 

As adults we tend to try to simplify things, it’s either black or white, a crime or not, someone is ether illegal or not.  But what happens to the hundreds of thousands of children who through no fault of their own ended up in that situation.  Are they products of crimes and therefore tainted goods?  Are they just as guilty as the parents and should be given the same penalties?  Should they be sent back to a country they have never known?  Again, I repeat myself as adults it might be easy to find rational answers to these questions but I’ve always thought that “rationality” like “sanity” is a relative term, just like “extreme”.  If you’ve always had money it can be easy to not understand why some people are poor, “work harder” you might think or “save more”.  All things that are easier said than done if you already have money.  When we were teenagers we saw our friend take their driving tests and eventually they got to drive cars, we watched as they got their first jobs and took spring break trips to beach front places in exotic lands and in the mean time we were reminded that we were less than human.  Brother was never able to handle being less than human.  I took that energy and channeled it into volunteering for places and eventually into my education.  I took lightheartedly the fact that I was “undocumented” and I certainly never cared what other people thought of me.  I am not saying that the things they said didn’t always affect me but I used that hurt and anger and channeled in to helping those who had less than me.  Brother man never could get past not being able to do what should have been a right of passage.  I understand him now more than ever and only now do I understand all his hurt, pain and rage.  Unfortunately my bother was always judged by his worst day and so often we sentence people to spend the rest of their lives in prisons because of the worst day of their lives.  I am not saying some people don’t deserve it and there aren’t psychopaths and career criminals out there I am just saying that things aren’t always as easy as we would want them to be. 

Living in the shadows of society and being treated subhuman is no life for a five year old boy.  What hopes and future does that child deserve?  Was my brother not entitled to his life, liberty and the pursuit of his happiness?  In his adult life he has/had a wife and two beautiful girls who love him and who always wished that he could let go of all that rage and anger.  Today brother I tell you I am sorry for not understanding you sooner for joining the bandwagon of people who judged you and for not telling you I love you more often.  I love you June.