A War on Good Days

"All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -Leo Tolstoy

To call any happy family "happy" in this day in age seems a stretch. Everyone seems to have a closet full of skeletons their kin is content to use against them. On some occasions, we even use these skeletons to wage war against our selves. I often refer to the person I was turning into two or three years ago. I use it to gauge where I am now and where I would like to end up in the future. I refer to this as the Are-You-Currently-Being-An-Asshole Meter.

Unfortunately, not everyone develops such a process of self-evaluation. So what do we do when those very people are your own family members? What happens when saying "look you kind of suck as a person right now" is not a viable option? 

My usual solution is to walk away because I am a pacifist at heart (read: lazy) and conflict of any kind makes me anxious. It's harder to do that when the problem at hand is your own little brother and you love him to pieces but he really does suck as a person sometimes.

It makes me worry when his outbursts cause my father to bike to the cemetery in the dark without warning or my mother sits quietly and just cries. I worry what will happen when I'm not here at home anymore and the focus turns solely towards my brother. Will the pressure prove to much? Will he crack? Will he accept help or deny the existence of a problem altogether?

Sometimes my brother and I will have really good days. We'll do things like make milkshakes for each other and watch the Colbert Report, the Daily Show, and Drunk History back to back and then repeat jokes to each other as we wander off to our bedrooms.

Sometimes we will have really bad days and those are the days that I worry about the most. I add them to my growing list of anxieties about going away to school and hope to whatever powers are at will that he grows up and out of it and very, very soon.