(This is a followup to my previous letter to my three siblings, which you can find on my LiveJournal here )

Well, it has been a while since my first email to you three, and I very much want to keep this line of communication open. I know it can be hard to stay in contact with people far away, even if they are your family. Trust me, I know! To quote sister Goldenhair by America :

“I’ve been one poor correspondent
And I’ve been too, too hard to find
But it doesn’t men
You ain’t been on my mind. ”

I think about you three, and Mom and Dad, all the time. I seem to have hit the stage of life when you spend a lot of time thinking about your childhood. Call it middle age. Call it nostalgia. Or just call it the inevitable result of being in therapy.

But I think a lot about my childhood, and what an odd child I was, and well, if I am thinking about my childhood, I am perforce thinking about you guys.

After all, you were there!

The other reason I wanted to write to you again, though, is that I feel like my previous letter did not come across the way I wanted it to, and that has been gnawing away at me for a while now, and I feel like I need to clarify things in order to salve my conscience.

I did not mean my letter to come across as accusatory or spiteful or especially as an attack on any of you. That is why I titled it “How I felt growing up”. My feelings, I can attest to without fear of contradiction. They are my feeling, subjective and personal, and that is that.

But I know that they are just feelings, that the realities were likely very different from what I felt, certainly different from what I feel now. Depression tends to make you very self-absorbed and liable to interpret things according to a very narrow narrative that puts you as the helpless victim all the time.

But I know I have played an active part in my own downfall, and I am at least mature enough to admit it.

So I am sure that you all have quite different takes on the events of our childhoods, and perhaps you even remember things very, very differently than how I have described them from my POV.

If so, I dearly wish for you to share your perspective with me. I want to know what it was like for you growing up in that crazy household. I want to know what it was like to have me as a little brother. I want to know the whole story.

For instance, I know I was a difficult kid in some ways. So stubborn! And not just stubborn, but precious as well, so I was not only stubborn, I was argumentative. It must have been a heck of a lot of hassle to try to get met to do things. No wonder you three never had the patience to teach me to do things. I was probably quite the handful.

I can clearly remember you all getting mad at me when I used my “professor voice”. It must have been quite galling, not to mention patently absurd, to me lectured by someone so much younger than you. I swear to goodness, I was not trying to talk down to you or assert myself. That is just how things come out when I am trying to organize and impart information. Perhaps it has something to do with having a teacher for a mother. Maybe I am just pretentious, I don’t know. But it wasn’t intentional.

Same with my being a little slob. I guess some of us are born neat and tidy, and some… not so much. Or maybe something went wrong when I was a wee tot. But I just don’t feel the physical world and my body the way other people do. For me, cleanliness is always a specific effort. I have to consciously remember to take care of things. I have no instinct for it.

I certainly remember poor Catherine sitting opposite me at the dinner table, desperately trying to civilize my table manners. Sorry about that sis! I must have seemed like a little animal to you.

I don’t want all of you thinking I do not appreciate what you have done for me, either. My conversations with you, Anne, did amazing things for developing my breadth of imagination and perspective, even if they did tend to get a tad heated at times.

And I remember you trying to teach me some of the crafts you so avidly pursued, Catherine. Too bad I was such a stubborn little clutz. Rug hooking seemed kind of neat. And what was the one with the little plastic tub? Some form of weaving?

And of course, Big Bro, I treasure all the time we spent together. Words cannot express.

So I do not want you to see my previous letter as an attack and I certainly do not want you all to think I hate you for how my childhood turned out. I was not purely innocent in it all, and I love all of you, and want us to be emotionally closer even though we are many miles apart.

That is why I write these letters, and I hope you will continue to respond to them. I do not want to set off a firestorm of accusation and recrimination and counter-accusation. I am not looking to hurt anyone or make anyone feel bad, although I recognize that with dealing with things long past, some negative emotions are bound to be stirred up.

But I am in therapy now, and there is only so far you cn go in therapy without dealing with the people in your family, the people who were there when it all happened, the people you love and will be connected to your entire life, no matter how long you spend apart.

I love you all so much. Please talk to me.