The lethal inter-family combats raging in Ukraine and Gaza have sent me back to my youth. The season is right for talking peace, however distant that may seem. So, today, I offer a family story, one I told recently in a Zoom storytelling event, about a moment when things changed and the war ended…
It’s the summer of 1964. I am 22 years old. I am driving a lime green Volkswagen Beetle through the sunny streets of Geneva, Switzerland. My parents are sitting in the back seat. Beside me, my brother Marty, 20.
Marty and I have hated each other for all 20 years, driven apart in a family civil war.
Mom is sounding off insistently and loudly about how she and Marty have been left out of planning for the day, how they are always left out, while Dad and I take over. Dad is sitting next to her, his controlled anger palpable behind his stony silence.
Then I hear something I have never heard before, the sound of a solid slap to the face. I look in the rear view mirror and see a red welt rising on Mom’s cheek.
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That’s a lot of information, all at once. Let me give you some background. We were on an intimate camping trip in Europe for two months. The first time the four of us had been together in five years.
Mom had been raging at Dad the entire trip, continuing a 20 year battle that would go on for another 35, until he died.
It’s not about today’s trip; it is an old fight, this home divided.
Marty and I had become the proxies for them, the pawns being moved around the emotional chessboard of their combat.
Simply put, our mother held my brother close; our father bear-hugged me.
She would do Marty’s homework and take him aside into her small study for private, intimate talks about what they thought of the rest of us, especially me and Dad, a closeness she never offered me.
Dad would take me to work with him, on long walks to talk philosophy (whatever that was to a ten-year old), to his parents’ home 180 miles away. The first time I returned from Europe three years earlier, he came all the way across the country to meet me in New York. He never did such things with or for Marty.
Obligingly, Marty and became their wing men. Marty went fishing with her; I went walking with him. Marty scorned school and grades and wanted to be a jock because I got rewarded by Dad for academic success, a “bookworm.” All of that was grist for our divided household’s struggle.
The enmity between us was fully acted out. I tried to scare him to death, once, dropping a butcher knife into the landing as he came upstairs so it would stick, point down, in the step just ahead of him. He retaliated by throwing his sneakers through the window of my bedroom door while I was inside, spreading shattered glass.
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So there we sat together in Geneva in the front seat of the Beetle. In the rear-view mirror Mom was staring straight ahead, as was Dad. In silence. Another chance for us to take sides.
Instead, I did something I had never done before, an impulse I did not summon up consciously. I invited my brother to step off the battlefield: “What do you say you and I go over to that café and get a coffee and let the parents work it out.”
For an hour or so, we did exactly that; sat in the sunshine and talked honestly about the parental war and how tired we were of being their foot soldiers. About how we wanted our own relationship, our own family connection, detached from their battle, no longer the holograms they conjured up. The first time we had ever had such a conversation.
When we got back to the car, the parents were still staring straight ahead in silence.
Our reconciliation, creating our own virtual family, continued on the trip back to New York on the SS United States. Marty and I shared a stateroom, got up late, had breakfast at dinner time, checked out the bar, the cabaret, the late night club, and ended up below decks early in the morning in a sauna or a Turkish bath. Never saw the parents.
We landed in New York City at the Times Square Hotel. Standing in the parents’ room, the father was once again planning our lives, while the mother objected. A renewed invitation for us to chime in. Marty got pissed, absorbing the combative vibes.
When he got angry, Marty’s rage came quick, deep and violent. He took a swing. Not at the father – too classically Oedipal. As with every other time in our childhood, I stood there as the proxy target.
In the past, we would have ended up on the floor, separated by the “good” parents who reestablished order in their home. But Geneva had changed things.
Without thinking, instead of swinging back, I simply grabbed his arm coming toward me, pinned it to his side, along with his other arm, wrapping his rage in a hug. In his ear I whispered: “I love you bro,” something I had never said to him before, nor even knew I felt.
Two brothers, in a civil war, who decided to end it with love, creating their own family bond. We have loved each other deeply, ever since.
I have spent 60 years since then, resolving conflict or exposing its sources. My life’s work probably started with those two moments, Geneva and New York, ending combat with love.
Reconciliation, deeper than forgiveness. Creating our own home.
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[If you would like to see/hear this story as I told it on December 3, here is the link to the five-minute video, starting at 15:20 in and ending at 26:00 https://healingstoryalliance.org/kind-stories-in-concert/.]
The Marty that My Brother Doug ( his classmate) and I never knew..
Very emotional for sure..
A Classmate from California..
Bruce
You're full of surprises, Abby!