I've missed what could have been

When I read The Scarlet Ibis in tenth grade I overidentified with Brother, and it made me ill.  I was mean to my sister in childhood just as he was mean to his brother.  There were times I wanted to leave her behind, gasping for air, so I could keep up with my friends and not have everyone see my damaged sister lagging behind.  There were times I did leave her to die.  (There was that one time when she actually died.)  The story has always been my most and least favourite.

(The other day J came home from her internship at the hospital, telling me about a baby who was born in a caul.  I do not think she read The Scarlet Ibis in her English class in high school.  Her English teachers were my colleagues.  Neither of them, in my opinion, would have had the fortitude to tackle James Hurst.)

Sometimes, in high school, I would discuss literature with my mother.  In fact it was the only conversation we could safely have.  She knew The Scarlet Ibis well, and she also had a brother who was damaged.  The difference was (is) that her brother did not die, strangled by the knot of cruelty that is perhaps, genetic.  Her brother is still alive today, and she claims to have been kind to him when they were children.  Perhaps she was.  He does not refute it.  My mother may have recognized, briefly, the way the story was striking me. But my sister was alive when we had these conversations; perhaps my mother could still look at my sister then without seeing gravestones.  Regardless, we agreed, at a time in our lives when we agreed on nearly nothing, that The Scarlet Ibis was a brilliant illustration of the complexity of sibling relationships and of human nature.

Sometimes I try to pick at the knot of cruelty, even try to pick it apart it just a little, but it is a tighter knot than one might expect. Being small it is easy to miss.  But there are times it nearly stops me from breathing.  It would be, wouldn't it, the ultimate justice if the knot strangled its owner instead of someone else?

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When I started writing this, I meant it to be about the ways in which I try (sometimes unsuccessfully) to stifle the urge to sabotage CC.  I have spent absurd amounts of time on self-reflection asking myself why I want to destroy her, and the answer is unclear.  She is shallow.  Is that enough of a reason?  Why does that mean I should be engaged in a perpetual battle with myself to smother my desire to undo her work, hide her belongings, discredit her with our colleagues?  Why do I hate her so fervently, why?  If I thought I could get away with more active displays of my distaste for her, I would not hold back as much as I do.  As it stands, I simply disclude her as much as possible, and I recognize that this is mean, old school mean, like a jealous sixteen year old lashing out, but I have spent time with this problem.  It isn't jealousy.  It's something else, something far more complex.

It is, like James Hurst's character Brother, me picking up on a weakness, a social mismatch, and instead of nurturing her, I want to exploit that weakness and make her face her imperfection and rue it properly and thoroughly, and concede that she is less able to chameleon herself in socially desirable ways.  Basically, I want to destroy her.  And this is twisted.  My entire career is based upon nurturing misfits and helping them find their niche outside the mainstream, embracing their true quirky selves, and I do this with genuine love and compassion.  It doesn't make sense that this one person activates such primal ugliness in me.  It makes me question whether I have capacity for sociopathy.  Does thinking such things qualify one for the diagnosis, or does one have to act upon those thoughts?  It's a fine line, isn't it.



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