Torn

A has gone quiet. I think I came across much too strongly and now he is afraid to contact me at all. I can't put any words on his feelings; they are his and I simply don't know, but having read various adoptee blogs I can only surmise they are not of the good kind.

Here's another thing. I have another blog. And I'd rather only have that one; don't like splitting the various parts of my life into bits. Everything that happens to me is part of me, and so also the appearance of a half brother -- a pretty major happening. And yet I don't feel free to blog about him on my main blog. There are a couple of reasons for this, and they are damned complicated. I'll try to explain.

The basic reasons are that the main blog is read by people who know me, people who live in that aforementioned small community where so little goes on the main form of entertainment is to gawk at other people. Also, dad was a 'someone' in that society, and not only locally, but nationally. So the gawk factor increases. Anything out of the ordinary becomes the most superb form of entertainment, and even though I know it would pass I cringe at the thought of putting the family through those initial stages.

But I oh so want to be able to include A perfectly casually -- no, that's wrong. I want to include these posts on the main blog. The good and the bad. And then I want him to be included in general. Because there is no good reason not to, only a lot of bad reasons.

Here's the more self-centred reason why I don't mention him on the main blog. Bear with me; it will seem a little beside the point at first:

When I was little and about to start school the mother of a girl who was to start at the same time 'found' me and introduced the two of us. We were seven and six years old (me the younger) respectively, and this constructed friendship lasted until about two years ago. Which coincidentally is the same time A appeared on the scene.

L was an only child, and I was there to represent the sister/sibling she never had. Of course, at the end of the day we went to separate homes and I fought with my real sister and she fought with no one. Her mother had overdosed on child psychology and was in addition from a highly intellectual and wealthy family where there were no raised voices EVER, and everything was to be solved with a sensible and mature discussion.

Totally against my nature, but hey! I could go home and be normal at regular intervals! I think L's mum thought both me and my family a little primitive (sister, dog, noise... noise! God forbid!), but for the sake of L she put up with my presence.

At 16 I left for a year as a foreign exchange student in the US. That year changed me dramatically and I discovered that people liked the more outgoing and boisterous version of me; I made friends easily, something I had not experienced in the closed-off symbiosis with L. Those who didn't like my one-liners simply kept their distance -- you can't make friends with everybody. In short, this year allowed me to develop into what I would have been without L, and demonstrated to me just what an odd couple we were.

But I was only seventeen on my return, and I left all my American friends behind and had virtually only L to come home to. I had no time to make new friends before she came down on me like a ton of bricks stating that she found my new personality abhorrent and extremely hurtful and if I did not change back to the pleasant, quiet version who never, ever teased her or made 'hurtful remarks' (those were my one-liners) then our friendship would, sadly, have to be a thing of the past. Ever heard of emotional blackmail? She invented and perfected it.

From then on I lived a double life. For the next twenty years I never objected to anything she said. I left that to others and watched her bite their heads off in a paranoid tirade about how they were intentionally out to hurt her when they did not agree with her in a discussion in her own home. This was of course extended to 'in a café' (they were then out to humiliate her in public), 'away from her own home' where she was 'in an unfamiliar environment with nowhere to go'... dadada, the list goes on. Her focus on her own (continuously declared) vulnerability, which apparently was beyond and above all else's, was quite astonishing. And pretty much an invention of her mother's who had gone to great lengths to visit all of L's school friends' parents to talk to them about her daughter's vulnerable nature, the poor petal whose sensitive nature had to be protected at all cost. The result: the child was permanently tuned in to her own vulnerability, permanently on the lookout for anything that could be interpreted as a hurtful remark, and permanently oblivious to anybody else's feelings.

When she was not around I could breathe more easy. And I did. Around her I kept my trap shut, with others I was simply being me; loud-mouthed and opinionated. Twenty years. At one point, about five years into this prison sentence, she loudly stated at some gathering, 'C has become so nice!' as if I had won some sort of prize. All because I never expressed an independent thought. It did not feel good. But I was long since conditioned not to make waves around her and found when I got really angry about something I was unable to express it except by spluttering incoherently. An unfortunate trait I still struggle to change. This is why I write. It gives me time to gather my thoughts and get rid of the angry red fog that takes over.

In a way I hate her family. I hate their well-behaved mannerisms, I hate what they did to her, a woman now unable to express anger naturally; when she shouts it's like watching someone who slowly looks up the terminology of anger in a dictionary, then tries to follow the instructions. It's plain bizarre. And because she doesn't have that immediate access to anger she never loses her eloquence. She can out-manoeuvre anyone in a discussion or argument because she has, in reality, never been stopped by the fog. She is totally lobotomised by generations of well-behaved intellectuals. And yet I have never met anyone angrier than her, or in more pain from not being able to get over it.

So what does this have to do with me not writing about A on my main blog? Well, L has one more 'character flaw'. She is extremely judgemental. And with her eloquence, being at the receiving end of her various condemnations is less than pleasant. Since she became a born-again Christian (yes, there is that too, and I realise she is beginning to sound like a total joke now but I assure you this is real and no joke), since her religious revelation, she has also become obsessed with perfection of some, to me, incomprehensible sort. The moment she hears of someone putting a foot wrong, be it a politician, a friend or a close relative, she judges that person's entire life and character with a vindication as if her life depended on it, with sarcastic eloquence of which you are unlikely to have heard the like.

I can only imagine what she would have to say about dad were she to find out he'd kept such a secret for fifty years. I am extremely reluctant to allowing her the pleasure.

Back to what happened two years ago. I suddenly stopped just taking it. She was on her usual rant about others who had in some way stepped on her toes and it was my job to agree, also about people of whom I had never even heard. I wasn't being 100% cooperative, asked about what had led her to draw such strong conclusions, and when she related that one of those people she had a falling out with had called her 'controlling', the ensuing pause which I did not fill with the required 'oh what a bitch!' revealed that perhaps, just perhaps I was ever so slightly in agreement with the stranger.

The evening went downhill from there. Feeling that she was losing her grip on me, she upped the stakes and threw her vulnerability on the table. This she did several times, with me just getting quieter. As she wasn't able to provoke the reaction she wanted she came up with the final trump card. Her husband mistreated her! He is one of my closest friends and I knew him for well over a decade before the two even met. I introduced them in spite of my worry that they would clash in some huge disagreement over world politics or something minor. Something that would force me to hear her slag him off for all eternity for having the audacity to protest in the face of her superiority.

My knee-jerk reaction to this news was to react exactly as she wanted. 'Oh my god! I had no idea?! What does he do?' The tears were real enough. The self-pity was real enough. But the story that ensued had little to do with mistreatment. And perhaps even she was aware that she was about to go too far in her accusations. Because what I heard was nothing more than your usual husband-wife disagreements where he did not always see things her way, which essentially was disloyal in her view (just as I was being disloyal by not spending the evening calling everyone she poured scorn on either a 'bitch' or a 'bastard' when called on to do so).

The evening ended as it had started. On a low. There were no trains running by then so I had to stay the night, and I knew that as soon as she was out of bed the next morning, the torture would continue. I did not sleep. I was utterly exhausted. From having kept my mouth shut for twenty years. From trying to break out of the whole thing. From the memories of having tried to stand up to her in the past and not having the strength.

I caved. But not by agreeing. As soon as M, her husband, got up with their toddler I told him L and I had fallen out over person X calling her controlling, that I was too tired to stay and have her accuse me of disloyalty in various unpleasant ways until I could make some pathetic excuse to get out of there and that all I wanted was to get home and get some sleep. And then I left.

The next day dad told me about A.