Brother ran away! Help.

paying3tuitions
Sat, 03 May 2008 22:48:29 +0000

This must be really tough on you as the brother, also about to leave for your future college dreams, wanting your family to be rock-solid. To me, you sound like a very fine brother and very fine son, but perhaps those roles are not identical. If you see your brother in classes, you have an unobstructed venue that your father and mother don’t. You can ask him, supportively (non-cursingly…), what’s going on in his life, how he feels about the girl, and other things that are meaningful to you as a brother. If it would urge your family sooner into counseling this summer before you depart, I’d ask your parents to go with you and maybe the other at-home brother. If your communal goal is to stay together as a family and not lose this brother, there might be advice. Don’t wait for the missing brother to sign on; you solo have the right to ask for this form of family support this summer, before you leave home, for your own sake too. In my tight family, one can initiate a request and make it front-burner, with the results benefiting everybody else. You’re not selfish to ask, even though they’re preoccupied with that brother and you may be the “easy” one to raise. (Familiar emotional territory here).

I’m thinking of worst-case and least-worst case scenarios right now, since you wonder what might have happened (best is to ask your bro, of course, at school…and leave your parents right out of the conversation. Console them on your own time, is what I think, just to try to keep the family from fracturing irreperably this summer.

Anyways: he might be betrothed to this girl (suggested by the fact that they’re not living together) so her family is ready to treat him as a son-in-law to finance his education close to their daughter. Her switch from BYU to Ohio might have even been a last-minute choice, created by that family to keep the couple together. She might also be pregnant. Or not.

If it’s not all that, maybe the two of them are each others’ first serious love and your brother’s thinking one year at a time. For next year, if he studies in Ohio even at a lesser (in your parents’ eyes, perhaps) location, he can still learn his major and head towards his career, but enjoy proximity to his girlfriend. That would be a more usual scenario.

I just know it’s hard to be the middleman. Of that I am sure. Try to preserve your relationships in all directions, realizing you don’t have to take sides to be loyal to each relationship, but carve your own unique communication.

For parents, it’s hard to see all 3 ready to leave at once. Your poor dad’s uncontrollable crying sounds exactly parallel to your mom striking down the bed; each knows they’re not in control of the most important decisions of their son’s life, and that’s a very big adjustment for all parents to handle.

I sure do feel for you, your brothers and your parents. I appreciate that you frame it as a family emergency, but it might take years to play itself out. It might bring in new ideas or people you didn’t expect, and sooner than you expected. Still, though, you can create family since it means so much to you all. There might be as many “sides” as people in the family, now that everyone is growing/n up.