Homeward Bound

In a couple of hours, my brother and I will be getting on a plane and taking him home. He wants to spend Thanksgiving with his kids and grandkids, and who can blame him? He hasn’t seen them in months and he misses them; more than that he appreciates them, and wants to figure out ways to show them.

There are two things he won’t be doing, however. He won’t be seeing our sister. He won’t be staying.

Our sister is one of his triggers. While she can be a heavy drinker, she can also walk away from a bottle of alcohol without a second thought, but she has no issue with convincing him that it’s all right to go hang at a bar with her, that she’ll stop him at “just a couple of drinks.” He didn’t understand for years why he allowed her to manipulate him, or why she does it, but he’s made a decision important to his ongoing recovery: he can’t see her right now. He’s not sure he can tell her no, and he’s not at all sure she respects his efforts to stop abusing his body.

His boys are fully prepared to physically block her way to him, though I doubt it will be an issue. I don’t think anyone has told her that he’s coming home, so she’s not sitting there making plans. Once we’re there I’ll call her, and I’d like to see her for lunch or dinner, and I hope she’s not too offended by the fact that I won’t allow any access to Craig, and once I go home his kids will make sure it doesn’t happen.

And he’s not staying. One of the things we’ll do in the next few days is arrange to have his stuff packed up and moved, and then I’ll come home. After Thanksgiving his son will fly back here with him, because Craig does not want to fly alone. He’s fully capable, but he has a few doubts about being by himself in a situation where a few bucks will get him a drink or two. He’s fairly sure his internal dialogue will try to justify it as “just one drink” and he’s very aware now that just one drink will never be possible.

If you had asked me a year ago if I would be willingly bringing my brother this far into my life, I wouldn’t have even been able to laugh it off because that was a level of absurd too impossible to think about. But now he’s moving here, maybe not for good but for a year or two. It’s either this or move somewhere else, because he’s fairly sure that going home for good is the wrong move.

The thing that has been most helpful to him here, I think, is living with TK. With TK there’s no emotional baggage to pick through as there would be with me, and TK has significant experience in helping people pick through their personal crap. Their friendship is somewhat symbiotic; TK helps Craig with his addiction issues, Craig helps TK with his relationship issues. That’s something I never saw coming, because Craig doesn’t have the greatest track record, but apparently TK is learning from Craig’s mistakes.

This isn’t all about Craig, either. It started with him asking for help, but it’s turning out to be important to both of us, and not just important to our relationship as brothers. We’ve touched upon a few things that I’d frankly never considered as being pivotal in childhood development for each of us, though I should have. We seemed to have taken then same issue and gone in different directions with it, something both curious and little bit sad.

I’ll touch on that some other time.

But, in any case, we’re going home, me for a few days, Craig for a couple of weeks.