A Gulf So Wide

I'm back in my row boat, trying to stay afloat among a maelstrom of ambiguous loss.

Photo by Fer Nando on Unsplash

A gulf so wide.

This phrase originally popped into my head on Mother’s Day 2021, as I swam in the warm Gulf water near Manasota Key, Florida. It was a solo trip taken not out of joy but to escape—yes, from the exhausting shitshow that was early 2021, but also escape from an escalation of despair, much of it due to my mother.

That spring, she had violated my privacy by sending pictures of my daughter and me to an online romance scammer. It was one of many things she had done in recent years that left me baffled and raw. The gulf between us was ever expanding, affecting my relationships and my sense of self-worth.

And so in Florida, eight hundred miles directly across the Gulf of Mexico from my hometown of Corpus Christi, I made a vow: to climb into a metaphorical lifeboat and start rowing. Not to my mother, but to myself.

I did the therapy, I read the books, I journaled, I hiked. And a narrative started to take shape, a narrative that I had successfully taken a hero’s journey in my little makeshift boat and made landfall. A narrative that I was healed. I then wedged that narrative into a memoir, partly as an effort to make my journey feel real. (I also started this newsletter as further proof.)

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And then this summer happened. While on another beach trip in Florida—this time with my daughter—a sheriff in Texas called me, looking for my brother as part of a wellness check. Was he with me, the sheriff asked.

With me? What?

I hadn’t seen him in five years. I didn’t even know if he was alive, though I hoped he was. I missed him immensely. After years of emails and texts to him went unreturned, I began to tell myself that he had cut me out of his life as a way of moving past our shared trauma. I rationalized that he had determined his family of origin was toxic. I wrote about this in my book (and in a recent newsletter post about our mother’s emotional immaturity).

As part of this long goodbye, I grieved for the ambiguous loss. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance—

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and then the phone call, the fucking phone call.

Two of my life’s central narratives—that his absence was willful, that I had mostly healed from my family trauma—collapsed. His absence wasn’t willful, and my devastation told me I was far from healed.

Sometimes people stop speaking to you because they don’t want to be around you.

But sometimes people stop speaking to you because they are too ashamed of what they have become. Or, more aptly, what they think they have become, as their addiction creates a deadly rip current of self-loathing.

Damnit, why didn’t I check on him all these years? Why did I react so selfishly?

After all that work overcoming my struggles with my mother, I am back in the torment again, paddling, paddling, paddling. I have thrown a safety rope to my brother, but it often feels inadequate. I’m trying my hardest to help him, because he is my brother and he is hurting.

As I make this journey, pardon any prolonged absences. I have a lot to process, and I need to root out a less artificial narrative to my life story. Along with writing, part of my coping involves deep dives into the systemic mechanisms that lead to or worsen intractable mental illness and addiction within my family. A recent one I can’t stop thinking about is limbic capitalism. More on that in a few weeks/months.