My brother Joe only sees the best of our mother. Whereas I recall her hands flying about my girlish body like angry birds, he recalls her fondly nursing him during his various childhood ailments. He is discomfited by my memories of her because they disrupt the gentle equilibrium he has laboriously structured about our ostensibly shared childhood and the mother who orchestrated it.

My brother ignores the abuses our little brother and I suffered from a petting zoo of perpetrators our mother maintained. She could have protected us, I insist, but she chose not to. Instead he offers the bromidic consolation that “she did the best she could” and he bristles at my retort that “her best wasn’t good enough.” We both agree that the lousy choices she made in life rendered her dependent upon the very men in her life who immiserated all of us. We both agree that she was a prisoner of her own devices. The difference is he refuses to hold her to account. I, in contrast, demand that she be held to account even in death. Whereas he has made peace with our life I continue to wage war against it because it waged war on me first.

He puts flowers on her grave on her birthday and death anniversary. He texts me photos of the assemblages with ritualistic attention. I tell him “you should invest more energy into your relationships with your living relatives than your dead ones.” He feels hurt. I feel vindicated. For him, photos of this ritual are a shorthand for a real connection with me. I see through the ruse. The fact is, it’s easier for him to send texts of flowers than it is to engage me and the hard facts that we had different mothers. He had the good one.

If I disrupt the fantastic equilibria he has constructed, he disrupts my monotonous melancholy and reminds me that there was some goodness in her. We can agree on those moments when she shook out and counted the change from her wallet collecting just enough so that he and I could go roller-skating. We both agree that she probably didn’t have lunch that day so that we could skate that evening. It’s good to be reminded of those small sacrifices. But I explain to him that these small sacrifices are inadequate recompense for her abuse and for her forbearance as others abused me and our little brother. We agree to disagree. Our little brother is too traumatized and inadequately engaged in therapy and well-prescribed pharmaceuticals to partake of the argument. He sits on the sidelines in pain at Joe’s indifference.

We had different fathers. Joe’s so-called father was present if always in an alcoholic haze of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Mine was a deadbeat dad. When Joe wanted to inflict maximal pain upon me, he would jibe “at least I know who my father is.” This stung. Because I knew that his purported father was not his real father. I knew because I overheard my—our—mother telling this to her girlfriend. She later told me this in an age-inappropriate confession hoping to console me and my lack of paternity. In doing so, she created a huge rupture between Joe and me. Joe labored under the belief he knew who his dad was. I labored under the conviction that I knew who my dad was but had the sobriety to know that my dad chose to go to Vietnam to being my father and my mother’s husband.

Joe and I should have been allies. Instead we were competitors for scraps of love in that household. But in Joe’s eyes, he had it all—an adoring mother and an adequate father. In my eyes, I had neither.

We even experienced her death differently. She doted upon him in her final weeks, days, and hours. She reassured him that he was the finest son a mother could have. With me, mom kept it real. I repeatedly apologized for my shortcomings of being a daughter. Whereas most normal people would offer reciprocal apologies, she denied me even a modicum of recognition of her myriad shortcomings. She denied me the apology that would have made all the difference long after she was gone from this world.

Thus in life and in death, Joe and I had different mothers. Thirty-four years have lapsed since she died. Joe and I are both in our fifties. And I can’t stop wondering if we had more similar mothers in death, if I could concede in some greater measure the vision he nurses of her in life.

– C. Christine Fair