sibling rivalry

May 6, 2018

The Conflict and Triumph of Living in a Family

Most think of a family as a place of safety. Think again. Not always.

At its best, surely it is a place of love. Yet humans interact there, with their potential for a fractious collision of moving parts. Conflict is always possible and sometimes essential, as in all groups.

Even within the nest, the big and little birds are looking for something from the other: dominance, protection, recognition, support, encouragement, gratitude, and guidance. Let’s take this apart a bit, focusing on the issue of dominance and transcendence. By transcendence I mean the individual’s desire to test himself in the peopled world: flourish, make something of himself, strive to “overcome” and take pride in his overcoming. No one wants to be last in line.

Ego and self-assertion are essential for all of us. Without a sense of our “self,” we amount to nothing, get rolled over and pushed around.

Start with the mom and dad. Cooperation is necessary between the parents, but 100% agreement isn’t possible. Definitions of fairness and equity are found in the eye of the beholder. Sexual stereotypes regarding a man or woman’s role interfere. People change over the course of a long marriage. Some of the alteration is a matter of aging, some learning, some of finding oneself. The marriage contract must be revised to accommodate transformation of even one of the mates.

I always asked a new marital therapy couple what drew them together. The answer became predictable: “He/she was hot and we had a lot of fun.” Of course, in twenty-years-time the instant heat has usually diminished a bit and the fun always has, otherwise the team would not be in for a tune-up.

We seek ourselves through others. They reflect our image back to us in work, friendship, and affection. In conflict, too. How we negotiate disagreement in a marriage leads to many possible outcomes: mutual growth, increased or diminished intimacy, and more or less security. Our well-being is affected. Does the couple triumph together, apart, or not at all?

The children, too, are impacted. A first-born can be recognized, loved, and lauded simply for his existence. He needs to test himself, nonetheless. Such challenges come first in getting the parents’ attention and care. Later, the same people will play the role of obstacle on the long road to his self-rule. Siblings (who threaten to take his spot on center stage) represent another hurdle. Outside the home, he seeks the kind of image he wants in the world of strangers.

The child (as he grows) doesn’t need approval for everything, but encouragement in his striving. He must find a place for himself without becoming a doormat at the foot of the staircase of life: someone invisible who may crave self-effacement in a misguided search for safety. Self-aware or not, he requires respect and freedom, striving to create an impact on at least a sliver of humanity, rather than existing as a mistreated and passive instrument for the fulfillment of ambitions in those around him; tossed aside when the user has no more use of him.

If the parents can manage the task, the battles within the family lead to learning and growth. Everyone wins, though bruises are inevitable. For the child to learn to bounce back, he must have someone to bounce off of. Everyone in a well-functioning home gets enough of what they need to take on the world with growing confidence. Toxic parents might enable some children to thrive, while others — those who serve as family punching bags — don’t receive adequate tools to achieve satisfaction and a measure of triumph outside of it: a victory characterized by making a mark worthy of an admiring look and respect; and the confidence to become a productive member of the human community: secure enough, happy enough most of the time, sufficiently persistent and resilient to manage the challenges that come to us all.

Looking at your family, both family of origin and the one you made, helps you to be grateful for what you did get, know what you yet must find, and recognize your part in raising your children to ensure their rising.

We are never free of the need to strive for something — to experience the sense of producing a positive effect in the world of man and nature. All goals will not be achieved by anyone, but we are so arranged that not everything one wishes for is required to make a satisfying life.

—–

The top image is The Painter’s Family by Grigorio de Cherico. The second is The Appearance of the Artist’s Family by Marc Chagall. Both are sourced from Wikiart.org/

February 10, 2018

Looking Through Another’s Eyes: More on How Things End

The death of a parent compels attention. Last week I described how my mother’s end allowed me an enduring and touching memory after a difficult history. But I’m not her only son, and my brothers hold different images, early and late. You should know of one I witnessed. To set the stage, I’ll say more about the Stein household we all grew up in, all with our particular vantage points.

Imagine Milton Stein forever working one of his multiple jobs and Jeanette Stein overmatched by raising all of us on her own. Sibling rivalry became inevitable. We all wanted more time and attention and a different kind of time and attention.

From dad, a focus on us as individuals and our specific interests and talents would have been welcome, instead of the distracted and generic love of a man in motion: about to leave for work, at work, back from work, or worried about making a living. He designed his life to prevent a “Second Coming” of the economic hardship he’d endured in the 1930s.

Mom’s life had no such organizing principle to supply ballast. Perhaps as a result, her internal turmoil wasn’t contained. Relating to her was a tightrope walk.

The challenge of dad’s early life was exceeded by mom’s catastrophic upbringing. Her father Leo: a charming, alcoholic bon vivant. Her mother Esther: a suspicious, hard of hearing woman who cycled between vicious criticism of her children and a claustrophobic, suffocating love of them. Perhaps worst of all, the family’s frank poverty allowed my mother only enough money for a candy bar at high school lunch. Malnutrition made her an easy target for tuberculosis, while the clan’s economic desperation and social chaos stole any sense of value other than her physical beauty.

Her papa and mine abandoned her, each in their own way. To grandpa, drunken outings grabbed him; for dad the need to work. The turmoil of a childhood household with lots of little kids left an ill-equipped mother at the helm; exactly where my mother found herself again, this time assigned the role her mom played years before.

The frustration and anger boiled over at us rather than her parents or her husband. Routine comparisons occurred. “Why aren’t you more like ______.” We all heard this and sometimes thought ourselves the least favorite child because we didn’t know the game permitted no winners. What you did well didn’t count for nearly so much as what you didn’t or did wrong.

Jealousy grew, each boy short-changed. But our mother could also be extraordinarily warm, your fiercest defender against the outside world, and heartbreakingly sad, as she struggled with her own parental and sibling relationships. Only later did I realize I got the best of both of my folks, their adored only child for most of my preschool years.

Maturity was required of me as the oldest. Job #1: take some pressure off my parents and be a protector of Ed and Jack.

Eddie was an active, eager, smart little guy, while Jack as huggable as could be. Like all younger brothers (Ed is four years my junior and one year older than Jack), Eddie wanted my time and companionship; more perhaps because of dad’s absences and Ed’s quick displacement by Jack as the youngest. But, of course, big brothers don’t have the time or want to give it. I’m sure my rejection hurt.

Our temperamental differences made things harder. I was scholarly and reserved, carrying the family banner through academia. He was active and devilish, the kid who rushed in and sometimes made a mess. We didn’t always get along.

Yet there were moments when I did the right thing. Though I was no fighter, I took on our next door neighbor when the older boy pushed Ed around. I didn’t win, but the point was made. My mother said my opponent now had a hard time combing his hair at the place on the side of his head where I landed my most forceful blow. Later an older kid from the local parochial school harassed Eddie. This time I wound up on my back. I am not in the Boxing Hall of Fame.

Superman, starring George Reeves, was one of the most popular American TV shows of our youth. Reeves (not the late Christopher Reeve) starred as the handsome, muscular hero who every little boy emulated. He fought for “truth, justice, and the American way” as the idea was understood in the 1950s. Thus, TV provided an iconic image even more potent than the comic books we read, while the alley behind the house gave you a playing field to enact whatever heroism might come to mind.

Eddie showed some particular compassion for me in the alley. I was in the seventh grade. The sport was a two vs. two touch football contest. In trying to elude a tag I dodged to the right – and slammed into a jutting garage abutment. The right side of my head made the crunching contact. I knew the contest was now no game.

Eight-year-old Ed saw me – saw what I’d done to my ballooning forehead and my blood-filling, closing eye – and wept.

When Ed and Jack got older we played in summer softball leagues in Chicago and Evanston. Ed became a fine first baseman and a power hitter who once hit three homers in a single contest. Jack, the best athlete among us, was a gifted, strong-armed, left-handed outfielder; fleet afoot and capable of slashing line-drives to all fields. He went on to become an award-winning amateur body builder and a successful business man. These were the guys you wanted on your side.

Not everything in Ed’s life came as easily as hitting a long ball. School was a hard place despite Ed’s intellectual gifts. The rules chaffed. Trouble beckoned. The wrong friends, the kind your folks tell you to avoid, weren’t helpful. Some of them would later die of their own recklessness. Accidents, suicide, murder, drugs? In a wild crowd everything is possible. The coin of a life – the heads or tails of it – turned in the air.

Finding your way is rarely easy. Ed managed – through intellect, hard work, and courage – to shed the bad influences and create a wonderful business as a home remodeler of artistic sensibility and refined craft. He is a devoted husband and father; a smart, generous, and decent man who you still want on your side.

Somehow, though full-up with sadness, the death of our parents meant an escape from the adult version of the crazy-making sibling animosity my mom never stopped fomenting. Such losses don’t always result in closer sibling relationships, what with fighting over estates and bequests. But in our family everyone played fair and reconciliation came in its wake.

Ed, Jack, and I figured out that being friends, not only brothers, was desperately important. That grudges, regardless of the cause, needed setting aside. Love, after all, matters more than just about anything. The things binding us – our memories of the folks, the time together growing up, and a desire to live by the Golden Rule – became more important than our differences.

One afternoon in our childhood, while I played in the backyard, Ed was indoors watching Superman. When the program ended, he decided the day begged for a solo flight. A white towel mom must have tied around his neck made a makeshift cape. He pushed open the window facing the backyard and got out on a ledge perhaps 12-feet off the ground, preparing for launch.

By the time I noticed him, Ed knees flexed like Superman preparing for take-off. I yelled for him to stop. He hesitated. But how to turn him around and back into the house? Before I could get upstairs Ed might crash.

A sewer manhole cover lay below the window, the place where Eddie would land, not the more forgiving grass. Mom didn’t answer my frenzied shouts.

I got underneath the ledge, braced myself, and asked Ed to jump into my arms. He didn’t take much persuasion. We both survived.

Fast forward now.

My mother lay unconscious in the hospital. She had a living will, with Ed assigned the power of attorney for healthcare. She’d told us she wanted no extraordinary measures. Mom told us all, over and over after the death of our father, she wished to die.

My brothers and I visited the hospital daily. Ed arrived first on the day in question. Mom’s physician entered her room. He wanted to perform an invasive, long shot procedure. No matter what mom might have asked for, the M.D. knew Ed had control. A conversation ensued. The doc tried to persuade Ed, then talked of Ed’s responsibility to the woman who raised him, guilted him and guilted him and guilted him. At last the “healer” ended his assault and threw up his hands, the indictment now delivered, the verdict of “bad, ungrateful son” rendered. The unstated implication was that mom’s money was more important to Eddie than her life.

Eddie walked out of the room. I’d entered the building minutes before and was strolling toward him down the hospital corridor. At a distance he was still my brother Ed; still a handsome, put-together man’s man with a steel core of toughness that could withstand anything. Wrong. He broke down in my arms.

Most of us could have rationalized conceding to the medical man. Jeanette Stein was now silent, the M.D. was not. Ed put her first, not himself.

I’ve had the privilege of knowing lots of courageous people, folks I met in my practice and elsewhere. Still, there are never enough.

When I think about Ed’s story, Ed’s last stand in defense of our dying mother, I recall his effort to be Superman at the backyard window.

I wonder, did I have to break his fall? In the last moment, Ed Stein – the real Superman who sacrificed a piece of himself in a hospital room – might have been able to fly. Yeah, compared to that, flying was easy.

——————————

For the most part, the images should be readily identifiable: two of my parents, Ed Stein in a photo I took of him hitting a double in a softball game, a cartoon of Superman, Jack Stein, the entire family around 1960 (with Jack, Gerry, and Ed from left to right), and Ed and the author in our backyard. Unfortunately, you can’t see the area of the intercepted Superman flight, which we are facing. Our garage, behind us, stands between us and the alley separating Talman Avenue from Washtenaw Avenue.

March 2, 2012

How I Saved Superman

superman

In little boys the line between reality and fantasy is a fine one. Santa is real, magic is possible, and mom and dad are the strongest, best, and most wonderful people in the world. In your imagination, fictional characters walk the streets and the greatest of them all, Superman, can really fly.

Day-to-day life in a home of three boys is, however, more complicated. In the home I grew up in with my brothers Ed and Jack, the magic — most of it, that is — quickly wore off.

Dad was usually working one of his multiple jobs and mom was overmatched by raising all of us, to some extent, on her own. Sibling rivalry was inevitable. We all wanted more time and attention and a different kind of time and attention.

From dad, a focus on us as individuals and our specific interests and talents would have been welcome, instead of the more distracted and generic love that came from a man who was always about to leave for work, at work, just back from work, or worried about work and the business of making a living. As a child of the Great Depression, he designed his life to prevent a “Second Coming” of the economic hardship he’d endured in the 1930s.

Mom’s life had no such organizing principle to streamline and normalize it. Perhaps as a result, her internal turmoil wasn’t contained. Relating to her was a tightrope walk.

As challenging as dad’s early life was, mom’s was infinitely more difficult. Her father, a charming bon vivant, was alcoholic. Meanwhile, her mother was suspicious, hard of hearing, and cycled between vicious criticism of her children and a claustrophobic, suffocating love of them. Perhaps worst of all, the family’s frank poverty allowed my mother only enough money for a candy bar at lunch. Before long, malnutrition made her an easy target for tuberculosis, while the family’s economic desperation and social chaos robbed her of any sense of value other than her physical beauty.

Although mom would have rejected the idea, her dad and mine almost certainly made her feel abandoned, even as different as they were. She was in second place with both. To grandpa, it was drunken outings that he preferred; to dad, it was work away from home. And the turmoil of a childhood household with lots of little kids and an ill-equipped mother at the helm was exactly where she found herself again, this time assigned the role her mother had played years before.

The frustration and anger boiled over at her children rather than her parents or her husband. Copying her mother, my mom would complain about each of her children to the others. Comparisons occurred regularly. “Why aren’t you more like ______.” We all heard this and thought we were each the least favorite child because we didn’t know that it was a game without winners. What you did well didn’t count for nearly so much as what you didn’t or did wrong.

Jealousy grew in this way, with each boy thinking the other was getting a better deal. But my mother could also be extraordinarily warm, your fiercest defender against the outside world, and heartbreakingly sad, as she struggled with her own parental and sibling relationships. Only later did I realize I probably got the best of both of my folks, their only child for most of my preschool years.

As the oldest child, I was expected to be more mature than they were. My job was to take some pressure off my parents, and to some degree, be a protector of Ed and Jack.

Eddie was an active, eager, extremely smart little guy, while Jack was an especially loveable child, as huggable as could be. Like all younger brothers (Ed is four years my junior and one year older than Jack), Eddie wanted my time and companionship; perhaps, all the more, because of dad’s absences and Ed’s quick displacement by Jack as the youngest. But, of course, big brothers don’t have the time or don’t want to give it, even as much as little brothers want it and need it. I’m sure my rejection hurt him.

Doubtless, our temperamental differences made things harder. I was scholarly and reserved, carrying the family banner of school performance as far as it would take me. He was active and devilish, the kid who rushed in and sometimes made a mess. We didn’t always get along.

In almost any life there are things you wish you could go back and do over, put right; take what you have learned the hard way and be nicer retrospectively. Yes, I was a kid, even if older than he, and certainly didn’t know down from up. Still, I wish I’d been a better older brother.

Yet there were moments when I did the right thing. Although I was no fighter, I took on our next door neighbor when that boy, slightly older than I, tried to push Ed around. I didn’t win the fist fight, but the point was made that my brother wasn’t fair game. And my mother said that the other kid had a hard time combing his hair for a few days, at the place on the side of his head that I landed my most forceful blow. A few years later and a similar incident happened when an older boy from the local parochial school took on Eddie. This time I wound up on my back. As I said, I was not a great pugilist.

Encounters like this often happened in the alley, as did many activities that were much more fun. In playing games there you could tap your imagination and take a role home didn’t offer. You might be a baseball hero, emulating Ernie Banks or Billy Williams, seeing yourself as the Superboy that parental judgment didn’t recognize. Approval at home might be in short supply, but as Ernie or Billy or Clark Kent’s alter ego there would be no end of cheering for you. And so you escaped from home’s gravity to a fantasy the alley permitted where, like Superboy and Superman, you could fly.

When we were all pretty small, Superman, starring George Reeves, was one of the most popular American TV shows. Reeves (not the late Christopher Reeve, who took the Superman role in the movies) was a handsome, powerfully built hero who every little boy wanted to be like. And with that, “to fight for truth, justice, and the American way” as the idea was understood in the 1950s. Thus, TV provided an iconic image even more potent than the comic books we read, while the alley gave you a playing field to enact whatever heroism might come to mind.

https://i0.wp.com/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Stamp_Day_for_Superman.jpg

But alley’s also held physical threats rather than the emotional ones inside the house. To retrieve an errant batted ball, you climbed the gutter downspout up to a flat-topped garage. A line-drive might explode a garage door glass window. And if you tripped, the concrete pavement could make for a painful landing and broken teeth. Quite a bit different from the sanitized and supervised public spaces where kids play today and not as safe as they are.

It was in the alley that Eddie showed some particular compassion for me. I was in the seventh grade. The game was a two vs. two touch football contest. In trying to elude a tag I dodged to the right — full-steam into a jutting garage abutment. The right side of my head made the crunching contact. I knew instantly that I was badly hurt. I dropped the ball and walked the few steps home.

Eight-year-old Ed saw me — saw what I’d done to my ballooning forehead and my shutting but blood-shot right eye — and burst into tears.

Ed Stein

As Ed and Jack got older we played games away from home, mostly in summer softball leagues in various parks in Chicago and Evanston. Ed was a fine first baseman and a power hitter who once hit three home runs in a single contest. Jack, the best athlete among us, was a gifted, strong-armed, left-handed outfielder; fleet afoot and capable of slashing line-drives to all fields. He went on to become an award-winning amateur body builder and a successful business man. These were the guys you wanted on your side.

Jack Stein

But not everything in Ed’s life came as easily as hitting a long ball. School was a hard place despite Ed’s intellectual gifts. The rules chaffed. Trouble beckoned. The wrong friends, the kind your folks tell you not to hang around with, weren’t helpful. Some of them would, much later, die of their own recklessness. Accidents, suicide, murder, drugs? In a wild crowd, everything is possible.

For a time, Ed’s life was like a coin in the air. Heads or tails? Who knew?

Finding your way is rarely easy and it wasn’t for Eddie. But Ed managed — through intellect, hard work, and courage — to shed the bad influences and create a wonderful business as a home remodeler of artistic sensibility and refined craft. He is a devoted husband and father; a smart, generous, and decent man who you still want on your side.

And somehow, as sad as it was, the death of our parents meant an escape from the adult version of the crazy-making sibling animosity that my mom never fully stopped fomenting. The death of one’s parents doesn’t always result in closer sibling relationships, what with fighting over estates and bequests. But in our family everyone played fair and it made reconciliation easier.

Ed, Jack, and I figured out that being friends, not just brothers, was something desperately important. That grudges, regardless of the cause, needed to be set aside. That apologies needed to be made. That love, after all, matters more than just about anything. That all the things that bind you — your memories of your folks, your time together growing up in the same home, a shared blood-line, and a desire to live by the Golden Rule — are more important than your differences.

But, as I said before, there were a few early moments when differences didn’t matter and brotherhood did, a harbinger of what was to come. One last childhood memory, then, to reinforce the point that just occasionally we did the right thing as kids. It was back when Ed was still young enough to confuse reality and fantasy. Probably even before he started school.

What am I getting at?

A time when Ed thought Superman actually could fly!

One afternoon, while I was playing in the backyard, Ed was indoors watching Superman. And when the program ended, he decided that it was a really great day for a solo flight. Before long he’d tied a white towel around his neck as a makeshift cape, opened the window facing the backyard, and got out on the ledge that was perhaps 12 feet off the ground, preparing for launch.

By the time I noticed him, Ed was flexing his knees the way Superman did just before take-off. I yelled for him to stop, and for the time being he hesitated. But how to get him turned around and back into the house? He could easily fall trying to make that maneuver. And, if I went back upstairs to pull him inside, there was every chance he would take the opportunity for his inaugural flight after all.

A sewer manhole cover lay just below the window, the place where Eddie would land, not on the more forgiving grass of the backyard. I didn’t know where my mother was and efforts to call out to her weren’t getting her attention. No one else was around.

There was only one thing to do.

I got underneath the window and asked Ed to jump into my arms. I braced myself. He didn’t take much persuasion.

“Ooof,” I groaned as his small body hit my chest and my arms. He didn’t exactly float down. I staggered, but didn’t fall. No one got hurt; no brain damage or broken bones on either side. No trip to the ER at Swedish Covenant Hospital, a place where Ed, Jack, and I all did more than a little time in those years.

In saving another you sometimes save yourself, find the best in yourself — find something that is important to both of you. And wind up in each others’ arms, where you belong. It just took a few more decades to get back to that spot.


So there you have it: the story of how I saved Superman.

A brother who became a friend. Someone you can depend on. A man whose career remodeling things and fixing things is a metaphor for what all three Stein boys did with our lives: repair and recreate ourselves, as many people have to do, but most don’t do nearly so well as Eddie.

A man who learned that a cape was not required to make his spirit soar.

A super man.

Happy Birthday, Eddie.

—

The images, in order, beginning with the second image: Ed Stein hitting a double in a softball game many years ago; Jack Stein at a body building competition in recent years; Stamp Day For Superman featuring George Reeves, 1954, from a U.S. Treasury Film; and Ed Stein and the author. All but the family photos are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.