As part of the August 2020 blog-a-day challenge I’m going to look back at something I wrote four years ago about ‘family’.
The little man on the left is my nephew. Four years ago he came to visit and I was moved by how kind and loving he was for someone so young and having the issues he has. Jackson was born with cerebral palsy.
He is the cause of the rift between my brother and I. I have written much about the problem I have with the decision my brother made.
[My] brother, the wonderful man who rejected this lovely little boy in favour of an evil woman, and then fell out with his brother (me) because I won’t reject my principles when it comes to family and fatherhood. He’s perhaps the very essence of anti-family.
Four years on and those wounds have yet to heal. Its quite possible that they never will. All I ask is that a man stand up and be a man. A father be a father. But that simple task is quite beyond him. It has caused a great deal of angst within the family.
Fran says I should speak to him, impress upon him how wrong he is in the decision he made. I considered it but he isn’t stupid. He knows. He knows it was wrong to reject a child. He knows it has impacted our parents greatly. He knows they’re upset with him. My Mum tries her best to keep the peach and maintain a relationship with him despite how much she detests his actions. I cannot comprehend his reasons for the rejection of his first born son.
I have gone back over something I wrote in 2016 and understood the irony of it:
Family, your children, your children’s children, your brothers and sisters. You can’t pick them. They might infuriate you. You might sometimes think you cannot stand the sight of them. But they’re family and, maybe it’s duty or obligation, but you stand by your family. You do not abandon them.
But how am I to fix that which cannot be fixed? What is an Al to do?
