Julia, DeKalb, IL
As far back as I can remember my parents argued, even when we were doing something fun like going on a vacation. I can still FEEL the heart-crushing sadness caused by their incessant bickering. As the oldest daughter I was recruited into their madness, forced to listen and sympathize with whoever had me cornered, pretending he/she was the injured party. In time I came up with a far-fetched plan: like a psychiatrist I would cure them both so we could have fun and be happy like the families I saw on TV.
My younger sister had other ideas. She staged tantrums and ultimatums, becoming an even bigger narcissist than both our parents combined. Sometimes they would actually stop arguing enough to worry about her… her grades…did she have enough friends? Should she see a psychologist? I don’t blame her for this strategy…she was a kid like me, but she added more crazy to the fire.
My sister navigated early adulthood by forming temporary but intense alliances with disparate groups: first the campus socialists, then a losing dabble with the Chicago Board of Trade, followed by a tribe of radical lesbians. After a move to New York City she converted to Judaism, got married, and became a radical vegan. My parents supported every one of her transformations, even pretending to be vegans during her visits home. My dad had always been an Adlai Stevenson kind of Democrat but eventually that would change.
The Kennedy Assassination primed his pump, only to continue with Y2K. My dad and sister bonded over dire warnings that the world was going to end on 12:01, January 1, 2000. Included in their mania was a deep mistrust of technology and the technocrats who ran it. Implicit in their beliefs was a hubris that only THEY and a chosen few knew what was really going to happen. Everyone else was in the dark. My husband and I were amused by their ridiculous predictions and when nothing happened on the big day we never heard about it again, but that didn’t stop them!
Almost immediately after the 9-11 tragedy both of them were accusing George W. Bush of planting explosives on each floor of the Trade Towers, frequenting websites with bad science that made them feel special and informed. That Christmas my father screamed at my husband and son because they didn’t agree with him. Our family was dividing in two.
In 2012 our parents were diagnosed with dementia then institutionalized so I’ll never know how far my father might have strayed to the far right, but my sister, lacking any ethical tether, fell under the spell of Alex Jones, Q-Anon, and Trump. One of her most heinous beliefs is that Sandy Hook was staged to influence restrictive gun laws, but she doesn’t stop there. She now lacks any sympathy for the poor and fears the year when whites are no longer the majority. According to her: Covid is a hoax, big pharma vaccinations are life-threatening, and she’s turning her crawlspace into a hoard of food and guns. I demanded that a recent visit with her to be “politics free” but soon she was spouting off the crazy stuff without any concern for our relationship or my feelings.
I finally let her have it when she called me “the elite.” Art majors like myself notoriously make less money than other graduates but in her mind, because I love art, I’m a snob. I yelled with pent-up gusto: “You’re the one who made a killing off the Covid economy and bought a house in a gated community! Not me! I live in a mixed income and mixed race neighborhood. Never call me an elite again!”
Who’s having the tantrum now?