My therapist once mentioned that the dynamics between my brother, sister, and me are more strained than those of any other sibling group she has encountered. It would check out, just given our circumstances that rifts would start young. My brother was born 8 years before me. My mom had him when she was seventeen after having already received one abortion. This was 1976 in Douglas (Drugless), Wyoming and then in the fall of 1977, she married my dad.
My brother wasn’t easy to raise and at one point, child services were called because my brother was found wandering alone along a busy street. Nothing really came of it other than my brother’s time at my grandparents’ increasing where sometimes my grandfather’s manic states would end up with them both in trouble. My grandpa would also become rageful as a result my grandmother was very checked out aside from the occasional “oh us and our mothers!”
Mom worked at Taco Johns for a stint while Dad worked in the underground uranium mines moving up to the oil rigs and eventually landing a job at the coal mines in Gillette, WY where I was born in 1983. I’m guessing my mom didn’t take any parenting classes and my dad was then estranged from his parents after he failed out of the Church of Christ affiliated university he was forced to attend. When I came along, it seemed my mom was more prepared financially and with a second caregiver.
I don’t remember too much about my early early years other than brief memories of my mom breastfeeding my sister while I pressed my own plastic baby into my chest wishing that it could actually suckle. I found my baby book with little events liking visiting Yellowstone and one where my mom has marked “shows jealousy of brother” when I was 8 months. Infants become distressed when maternal affection is no longer exclusive and my brother was distressed, too.
My brother feels resentment towards me for being born; however, our Mom did not have many exclusive moments with either of us. She, like my grandfather, had some polarizing tendencies that would produce mania and extreme feelings of exceptionality (she would call herself Jesus in psychotic episodes) to depression and feelings of being unworthy. Her last phone searches before she died by suicide were questions about whether she would go to heaven.
My sister was born in 1986, and I was excited to have another girl whose hair I could pepper with barrettes and whom I could boss around. Mom became pretty connected to her early on and she would undulate between health and illness and was late on a few developmental markers. My parents once left her footed pajamas in a bucket with a turd floating right on top in the bathroom. I’m not sure why it was left as my mom liked to call herself a domestic engineer as she took on performative house duties making sure things were at least clean.
By the time I got to college, I figured I had a pretty normal childhood. I was riding the grief train after the deaths and suicides of a few close friends realizing then that grief can leave some pretty gnarly scars. I began to uncover more memories in a graduate level nonfiction course (invite only!) when the assignment was my first memory of anger. I wrote about my Uncle Warren laying into me for sneaking clumps of apple goo out of the pie on the counter.
Our household experienced significant tension. My brother didn’t stop with the behaviors and his delinquency became typical. The few times my parents left us alone with my brother. I accidentally grabbed an antique quilt made by my grandmother to put out a fire he had set in the prairie and got us all in trouble. His own troubles became exacerbated by my successes and while he was in the Worland Boys School my parents had my IQ tested but I didn’t know what was going on so it became a strange man taking me to a strange room and asking strange questions.
Before I considered things intergenerationally, I would often consider the genesis of any “bad parts” of my childhood my brother’s incarceration. When I was in fourth grade, he had stolen a book of checks from my parents and for one fall I watched Gameboys appear from his room, gifts to my parents on the mantle. I got us all in trouble again when I reported to my parents that I had conquered a new level of Tetris and they soon figured out that it was him and his friends who had just committed the crime spree on the news that included break ins of over 50 vehicles.
After he left, things got a little easier but also harder in the home. Family therapy was attempted and my sister refused to participate and by the time I was 16 my parents sent me to Wyoming Behavioral Institute as the best option they had for rehab. At that time, I had only smoked marijuana. When they tried to bring me a second time after finding needles in my bedroom our insurance wouldn’t pay. My sister was made to write letters to me to shame me while I wrote letters to my brother hoping he would remember his family.
I attempted for years throughout college to reengage my brother and mend our relationship which I see now was non existent and the contest for moms attention seemed to cross lifetimes. Eventually our dad passed away in an accident in our home, falling from the second story sliding glass doors and hitting he head on the concrete pad below before his organs started shutting down in the freezing cold. For a brief moment, my brother and sister and I united in grief. We were devastated.
I showed my ugly side during this time and made a horrible remark directly after my sister had called me about the accident, remarking “what did Mom do” because I had been living in the home up until a few months prior to his death and the fights were awful. I asked them both separately why don’t you divorce. My mom didn’t have a clear answer, and my dad would always say “what would your mom do?” It was a horrible dynamic with mom filling journals with endless cursive describing in detail how much she disliked both dad and me; dad squeaking around in his computer chair for hours gambling away his money by convincing himself he was profiting from selling short.
In my attempt to become closer to my sister in the years after my father’s death I began to open up to her about some of the mental health symptoms I would experience during meth use. I told her about the shadows that looked like creepy little dudes and how I thought I saw Dad passing my room when he was 70 miles away loading trains with coal. She described how she saw these things too and sees ghosts all the time.
I wanted my sister to feel special, and I wanted to feel like we were connected so I went along with the narrative that she had created. In her reality dad and I were both evil somehow and the shadow people and their hooded ringleader would go back and forth between my room and his office. The darkness killed him, and I have it in me. On my end, I figured she just experienced us both as angry at times, so I let it go.
During this time of connection I also reached out to my brother who began opening up to me about his dreams of becoming a counselor and I even visited him in Crested Butte one fall and went on a hike. To get to the hike we had to go down a pretty rough road that I once again felt gooned by my brother but excited that we were adventuring again. My sister even took a trek down to Salida to scoop me and go see my brother. I paid for everything despite having just been fired. I wanted them to like me.
After that trip things started falling apart and all of us began to deal with major life events. My sister had moved back in with my mom after she spent a few years in Utah in some kind of polyamory situation. It’s unclear exactly what happened, but the rich man gave my sister and other women at the house lots of money for sex. This all came out in drunken phone calls as we both suffered the ups and downs of alcoholism. I just wanted to be close to her but my drunken rants were pushing her and everyone away.
In meth fueled paranoia I began to do background checks on everyone including my siblings and realized that my brother was suffering significantly during this time as well and had some pending crimes against him that would surely send him back to prison. The citations included something about intercourse. I mentioned this to my mom along with my sisters transgressions and I blew the whole thing open
All of us siblings have dealt with substance use issues and mine have been behaviorally exhausting and have tested the limits of my family’s grace and love. Drugs in Gillette, WY are wildly accessible and I fell back in hard and eventually went to treatment for the 3rd time to get off fentanyl. As I tried to claw out of the bucket of crabs my mom became estranged and my sister kicked me out of her house leaving me at the Motel 6 in Rapid City, SD.
I had pushed away my brother and sister most likely to the point of no healthy return. My uncle stepped in and coordinated my trip to treatment in Aurora, CO while my sister took care of my dog.
That autumn after getting out of treatment I had to go to court to defend myself for an animal cruelty ticket I had picked up during a horrible episode of withdrawal. My sister was still trying to help me in the ways she could, but it was also connected to her keeping up the image with my uncle. She had a lot to gain.
If my uncle had died before I got well I don’t know that I would be alive. And now that he is gone he has named us all beneficiaries and I’m the third in line getting 15%, my brother 20%, and my sister with around 60% because she got my mother’s share after her suicide. Both of my siblings are now taken care of for the next 15-20 years even if they never work again, and they haven’t worked since he died.
I paid off my student debt and a bought a car using the inherited retirement money and my mom’s life insurance, taking a heavy tax hit and now I’ve got about $1000 total in both checking and savings and nothing for the future.
And here we are now—three siblings suspended in the strange gravity of an inheritance, tangled in our history and each other’s shadows. We are no longer children vying for the elusive attention of a mother who wandered between mania and despair, nor are we just echoes of our father’s quiet sacrifices. We are adults, tethered by blood but severed by scars. They have their shares, secure for years, and I am here, clutching the weight of what’s left—what I’ve fought for, what I’ve lost, and what I’m trying to rebuild. Perhaps we were always each other’s ghosts, wandering through the same haunted house, and maybe now, we are just trying to find the exits.
the misfit west 