Brothers (and Me)

by Donna Britt

  Such out-of-control episodes were rare. Yet they made me feel like an imposter. I had told myself that I’d given up syndication for the sake of my kids. Yet here I was making them suffer. My phony selflessness couldn’t obscure the pissed-off bitch I really was. My daily meditations, religious readings, and regular church attendance felt like a sham.

  Yet sometimes, I felt I wasn’t the problem at all. At such moments, my mind was like a heat-seeking missile, latching onto anything or anyone else to blame for my vexation.

  Like the morning I pulled myself out of a juicy writing stream to make some fresh coffee. Filling the coffeemaker, I noticed that the dishrag was filthy. Tossing it down the laundry chute, I thought, Better wash a load. Passing the den on my way to the laundry, I spied dishes covered with half-eaten food. Damn. Scraping them, I heard the phone ring: Kevin with a question. By the time I turned on the washer, forty minutes had passed—and I’d internally listed the sins of every male—Kev, the boys, the dog, God—responsible for the bedlam. Woe is fucking me.

  In the midst of my Oscar-worthy soliloquy, I remembered: I could have just gotten the coffee. Nobody made me do the other stuff, except the part of me that craved some small semblance of order. As tragedies go, schlepping after guys who adored me wasn’t so terrible when millions face war, poverty, and disease.

  Any honest exploration of women’s outrage at our unbalanced contributions must acknowledge how we feed the problem. The secret pleasure we take in being so essential. The ego boost we get, knowing that if our contributions halted, the whole house of cards would collapse. The power we wield, having final say over how well chores are done, and over our kids’ hobbies, diet, playmates, even our mates’ attitudes. Hate half-folded clothes and barely scrubbed dishes? Do them yourself. Detest hubby’s frown when, for the third time, you ask him to walk Prince? Do it yourself.

  Sometimes, I had trouble being firm with my own family. Afraid of being a nag, the girl who’d seldom backed down from her brothers worried she was too nice. Like innumerable unsuspecting mothers, I’d become a victim of Mom-empathy, the unerring wavelength detector women develop after giving birth. Great for discerning kids’ feelings when they’re inarticulate tots, Mom-empathy is counterproductive when toddlers become housework-avoiding preteens. Hating every second of it, I’d remind one of my sons of a chore. Rolling his eyes, he’d do it, but his reluctance gave me a tiny jolt of anger. Reminding another son elicited an exasperated head shake, and another Mom jolt. After the hundredth sigh, shrug, or protestation of a headache, some overjolted women give up, or wonder, Why can’t these guys see what needs to be done when it’s right under their noses? One day, while picking up the seven hundredth wadded-up tissue, the answer came to me:

  Hardwiring. Prehistoric men were hunters. Stalkers of prey needed laserlike attention to track their quarry; every unnecessary detail faded. Centuries later, guys in my house were similarly riveted by the newspaper and PlayStation 3. Kevin wrote a whole book in an office ten feet from the laundry room—and never washed a load. I allowed this. His first book was too important to be disrupted by a mere basketful of darks.

  Want to guess how many loads I washed while writing this book?

  But I’m a woman, hardwired to be a multitasker—or multiseer. The hunter’s mate needed eyes that could sweep vast landscapes, assess her child’s, mate’s, and elderly relatives’ well-being while locating hidden fruits, medicinal herbs, and poisonous plants. Scientists say men and women viewing the same landscape see different things. Women see more colors and textures, hear and smell details men rarely note. Is it any wonder that men don’t see our needs or respond to them as we do theirs?

  During a recent party at a friend’s house, I sat in the kitchen chatting with Larry, the out-of-work host. Something, I didn’t know what, felt wrong. Then I realized: the whole time we were talking, Larry was working, wiping counters, loading the dishwasher, rinsing plates. I’d had countless chats with multitasking women during parties, but never with a man. After weeks of doing chores while he looked for work, Larry viewed a party chat as I might: a chance to get stuff done. I recalled dinners where I’d watched male hosts clear tables and wondered, What’s off here?

  What was off, of course, was me. The forces that rocked the nation’s social and economic firmament barely tweaked men’s and women’s basic natures. Though I was grateful for the opportunities provided by the women’s movement, I felt frustrated by the flip side: doing nearly as much at home as my 1950s counterpart, with as little appreciation. I wasn’t just invisible at the office I’d left; I was transparent to the family I’d left it for.

  Where was the victory in that?

  It’s time I addressed the feeling that transformed Ilena’s face. The one that inspired me to wrongfully smack Hamani, and that routinely engulfed me as I made my Invisible Woman rounds in my home.

  I’m talking about anger.

  I hate to go there. Unlike women who “celebrate” their rage, I find unchecked anger repellent. Sometimes the intensity of my fury scares me.

  None of which keeps me from being consumed by it.

  I’m talking about the rage familiar to nearly every woman who has a significant man in her life, the acrimony she feels when he displays the stubbornness, contempt, or willful blindness toward women—toward us—that can infect the most enlightened of men.

  Women’s anger often appears out of thin air. I can’t count the times my husband has blurted, “Why are you so hostile?” during seemingly innocuous arguments in which my face and voice morphed into a slasher-flick villain’s. There’s nothing pretty about this kind of rage. So many of us bury it, until it explodes when we least expect it, making us react in foolish or self-wounding ways because, as Ilena says, “We’re not making it count where it should.”

  Some measure of the outrage we spew at loved ones is actually directed at ourselves. We suspect the ways we’re culpable, the hand we have in our own diminishment. Unable to stop ourselves, we wonder why it’s possible for us to notice the slightest moan, grimace, or sigh from our family members while they remain blind to our flailing. Which only increases our anger.

  Sometimes we don’t need words to express it. Most people would describe me as warm, even kind. Yet sometimes when a guy irks me, a glance my way suggests that likable woman has evaporated.

  In her place is an identically dressed stranger wearing the Death Look.

  Unlike women’s typical expressions, the Death Look wishes instant annihilation upon the man who summons it. Recently it appeared on the face of my friend Anne after her husband announced he’d made a major decision for them both without discussing it with her. “Was that okay with you?” he asked.

  After the Death Look froze him, her intrepid spouse dared to ask, “Why did you look at me like you wanted to kill me?” despite the obvious answer:

  She wanted to kill him.

  Oh, all right, Anne didn’t want her husband dead—any more than I’ve wanted to disappear Kev, my sons, my brothers, or the male friends at whom I’ve shot the Death Look. What we long to obliterate is the impulse that makes them ignore, dismiss, snap at, or go back on their word to us.

  Other weapons in women’s anger arsenal include sarcasm, slammed doors, withheld affection and sex, brooding silences, and, rarely, physical violence. Because the intensity of these responses is often out of proportion to the actions that inspire them, I’m convinced women’s fury can be traced to the centuries of oppression they’ve endured.

  From the beginning of time, women have terrified men—through our sexual power over them, our ability to bear life, our connectedness to, well, everything. Fear inspired them to deny our brilliance, burn us at the stake, bar us from pulpits, prohibit us from voting, and otherwise disempower half of humankind.

  Yet the vast majority of women have still wanted men in their lives. My brothers softened me up toward guys long before I could develop defenses. That’s what families do: drop incomprehensible people in our lives, show
us their worst, and make us love them anyway.

  But if a woman really wants to be truly buffeted by adoration and apoplexy, she has to have children.

  Recently, I was lost in my work when Mani, visiting from Los Angeles, asked if I’d seen his keys. Torn from my writing for what felt like the twentieth time, I snapped “No!” and threw him the Death Look. His baffled expression stung me. How could he know that rather than hearing him ask if I’d seen the keys, I’d heard him insinuating I should know their location, or worse, stop working to find them? I hated the absurd sense of protectiveness that made me want to shield him from something as minor as misplaced keys.

  A mother’s compulsion to safeguard her children can be wholly irrational. So can our giving. There’s no one on whom we’re more driven to lavish our time and attention. Bonds that primal are hard to govern, so sometimes we lash out at our kids.

  I can’t speak to the seismic undercurrents affecting mothers’ reactions to their daughters. But having sons has meant that the gender-based fury I sometimes feel toward men gets directed at them—at times deservedly. Like racism, sexism is in the air, ripe for absorption through everyone’s tender skin, even our boys’. You think Darrell would have thrown that ball at Kevin?

  As a black woman, I see women’s out-of-nowhere acrimony as symptomatic of the wrenching pain felt by members of any long-oppressed group. Too often, women are assumed to be less important and capable than men. We’re paid less by some, shushed for speaking disconcerting truths by others, and treated like walking breasts and butts by far too many. These nicks and bruises accumulate like ash, gas bubbles, and dirt in a dormant volcano.

  Our explosions aren’t just inevitable; often, they’re justified. Once upon a time, I reveled in the cleansing “Hell, YEAH!” I felt after releasing my wrath. But at some point, I noticed how depleted I felt afterward. The tense silence that invariably followed such explosions felt nothing like the peace I craved.

  Women’s rage often doubles back on us. Draining us, it alienates those whose empathy, not fear and resentment, we hope to engender.

  At some point between fuming about my workload and wondering which role I was more invisible performing, I knew: my problem wasn’t just with men, but with women. One woman:

  Me.

  The hardest place to look when you’re assigning blame is the mirror. But I couldn’t help noticing: some women didn’t have my problem. Yes, some had mates and kids who gladly contributed around the house. But there also were women whose shrewdness, self-discipline, or training helped them get more of what they needed from their families. Other women decided they could live with modern life’s messes. Still others gladly took on nearly every family-related task. It was as instinctive to them as writing was to me. I admired these women, wished I was one of them.

  But I wasn’t. I needed order. And I wasn’t just annoyed by what my men didn’t see and fix. I was fed up with the part of me that couldn’t stop seeing and fixing stuff for them. Rejecting that giving impulse felt impossible. Surrendering to it felt like defeat.

  I knew I was as smart and as capable as any of the men I’d given to—and that for all my anger, I loved having a life where I could use my gifts in both my home and my career. Feminism had made that versatility possible, provided the blueprints for striking down the barriers that would have prevented it. I couldn’t have been more grateful.

  But where was the blueprint for changing… me?

  Escape

  Darrell playing a gangster for acting class, 2006.

  After months of alarmed speculation, midnight arrived uneventfully on December 31, 1999: Y2K, the moment when the twentieth century finally spilled into the twenty-first. My delight that a new century had begun without computer systems crashing and misdirected planes falling from the sky lasted until three a.m., when I heard Mani’s key in the door. Listening as stumbling feet ascended the stairs, I realized our seventeen-year-old son’s voice was too shrill, and his friend Mike’s shushes too urgent, for there to be any other explanation: our “perfect son” was roaringly drunk. The guys had taken the subway to the Capitol, where they’d sipped bottles of Coke and cranberry juice spiked with Smirnoff while awaiting the new millennium. Appalled, I lit into Mani about the dangers of drunkenness. Years later he’d confess that he’d started drinking and smoking cigarettes in high school to feel sophisticated. “I just didn’t want to be a kid. Adulthood meant being my own man.” That’s why he started working at a local video store at age fifteen and chose a college 1,700 miles from home. I’d thought he was being brave and industrious. In fact, he was plotting his escape.

  One other thing about the night I scolded Mani for his inebriation: Watching his humiliation from the upper bunk, his little brother Darrell couldn’t have looked happier.

  I don’t recall the subject of my meditation that morning in 2007, or the errand I had agreed to run for my son Darrell. Deep in contemplation on the couch, I felt my mind drift from God to the more pressing matter of my to-do list. How could I squeeze in Darrell’s request? I breathed.

  And just like that, I saw—no, felt—a fleeting thought that I must have had hundreds of times without noticing: I have to do this or he could die.

  My eyes flew open. “What?” I blurted, though no one was there to hear me. Had I actually thought something as irrational as, “If I don’t run an errand for my son, he could die?”

  I had. Then, just like that, I understood: Three decades after the fact, I still felt responsible for my brother’s death. When Darrell died, putting one foot in front of the other had felt impossible. In such a state, I couldn’t begin to process how culpable I felt, but I’d been acting on that culpability ever since. For twenty years, my brother Darrell had been my heart. When we grew apart, I told myself the gap would disappear as we settled into adulthood.

  But Darrell had died—an event so huge, so inexplicable, that someone besides the policemen who’d pulled the triggers had to be to blame. Of course I chose me. I hadn’t done anything wrong, so I turned to what I hadn’t been doing: paying attention. I hadn’t been watching Darrell, checking in with him, keeping him beyond the reach of pistol-wielding cops. I’d dropped the ball and there was no retrieving it. Back when I’d known Darrell’s every move, he’d been safe. Stepping away had made him vulnerable.

  I had let my brother die.

  Of course I’d never thought this consciously. It took three decades for me to even capture the quicksilver thought born at my brother’s death, to grasp it solidly enough not just to respond to it but to hear it:

  If I’d been there with him, tending to him, supporting him, he wouldn’t have died.

  No sane person knowingly embraces such a lacerating belief. Yet unconsciously, I was convinced of my guilt. So I resolved that no one else I loved—certainly no man—would die because I wasn’t there for him.

  It’s ironic that an errand for my middle son sparked my realization about his predecessor. Two decades of kinship with the brother I’d named him for had had the sweetest sense of ease.

  A single day with my son Darrell could feel like a thousand years of hard labor.

  The biggest challenge any over-giving woman is likely to face is her kids. Especially if she has a kid like Darrell. Daily, my middle son tested me. The boy whom I’d prayed wouldn’t be born on Melech’s birthday was every bit as exasperating as his uncle.

  It wasn’t fair. Motherhood was an adventure I’d felt born to undertake, and everything about my firstborn, Hamani, suggested I was stupendous at it. Why else was Mani so popular, honest, and affable? Yes, he sometimes got impatient or agitated, but he never lingered there. Like at twelve, when he confessed to me a crush on a classmate. Days later, he phoned from school, an alarming tightness in his voice as he asked, “Mom, can you pick me up?” The girl, he said, had rejected him for another boy. Mani was an A student who never avoided school; I couldn’t say no. The next day, he was quieter than usual. Then, emerging from his funk, he said, “If she likes h
im, she should be with him. She should be happy.”

  Happy? I was still fighting the urge to storm the school, find the ungrateful twit, and shake some sense into her.

  Mani’s little brother’s purpose seemed to be shaking me, out of my smug sense of competency as a mother. By age seven, Darrell was greeting my “good morning” with a scowl, dodging school-and housework, and ensuring that the slightest skirmish escalated into World War III. Everyone was against him, especially me. As if to ward off attack, the kid even slept with his eyes half-open.

  This tiny boy’s smoldering sense of aggrievement puzzled me. I couldn’t have loved him more. Why didn’t he believe it? As the mom who slipped praising notes into his lunchbox—You’re the best!—I couldn’t have guessed one source of his pain: the examples set by his successful parents and paragon of a brother. “I felt early on I couldn’t live up to the family name or my older brother,” Darrell later confessed. “So I thought, Screw it. If I couldn’t be great, why not be really, really bad?”

  His overachieving brother made him feel irrelevant. Being the rebel, the bad guy, gave him an identity.

  “It became good versus evil,” he said. “I started to enjoy it.”

  My most difficult son was a teenager on the morning I sat stunned on the couch after realizing I felt responsible for my brother’s death. Though pinned to the sofa, I felt an unbidden sense of liberation envelop me. The life-limiting belief I’d harbored—if I don’t give to them, protect them, do for them, they’ll die— made my over-giving make sense. If sacrificing would stave off some horror, these offerings weren’t just about guilt or subjugation. They were acts of love.