room to breathe

We are in the midst of the discussion when my mother changes gears. She had been commiserating with me in frustration over my brother's lack of involvement in our family in recent years. This is a topic she gets easily riled up about, as—since moving to his wife's country seven years ago—my brother has only returned home once, and never with his children. But in this moment, as I admit that he has entirely ceased calling me—which I used to be able to count on him doing once a week without fail—tears begin to flood my cheeks, and some mothering instinct kicks in, allowing her to see the situation, finally, in a new way.

"It's that apartment," she explains, suddenly uncritical of him for the problem; "no one has any room to breathe in there." My sister-in-law, she points out, grew up in a crowded home, sharing her small bedroom with a sister and an aunt for many of her younger years; she is used to this. My brother isn't. Even more than us—my mom and I both now living in apartments with no outdoor spaces, no patios even—he has no space to himself, no yard or even just a quiet room to move into when decompressing time is needed. Mentally we both compare that to the small house in which I grew up—snug but surrounded by land, by grass and bamboo stalks, a thick stand of trees and a creek. That is what he and I grew up thinking of as a home: a place with indoor and outdoor rooms: opportunities for family members to be together and to be apart.

Suddenly the concept of three children under age five and two parents living in a two-bedroom apartment seems ludicrous to me. Their apartment is hardly bigger than my own—in which I, living all alone, often feel captive, having never before, in 33 years, lived anywhere that didn't have some sort of green outdoor area to it. I would go out of my mind if I had to daily share this amount of space with four other people—three of whom, though marvelous in so many ways, are loud, ever making noise, constantly in motion. I picture his face when he sits in his living room playing his heart out on the guitar for 20 or 30 minutes each day, and despite the frenzy of games and paintings and children's books at his feet, despite the dancing of toddler toes around him, despite the effort of more than one little set of fingers to work their way between the frets alongside his--despite all those intrusions, for those 20 or 30 minutes each day, his eyes are shut, and perhaps only then is he ever anything like alone.

Perhaps, my mother suggests, his life is simply too crazed with all children beyond baby stage and in such a small home that he steals any quiet moments for himself instead of for calls with me. And perhaps that's all he really can do, she sees now.

She has, after all these years of being mad at him, discovered a sense of sympathy. Now I must learn to give him that emotional space too.