I’ll try not to make this too long: I am in my 30s as is my brother, who we adopted when he was a child.
He was diagnosed with a ADHD at a young age and was a very, very difficult child and teenager. He was violent, lied often, stole often and was always in trouble at school. My parents’ decision to adopt him ruined my childhood. I have such lovely memories before he came to live with us and mainly awful, traumatic ones after. I was 10 years old so lived at home with him for 8 years and then moved away for university.
I didn’t communicate with him at all for most of my 20s but after I had my first daughter, 6 years ago, I began to build a relationship with him. I now have two daughters and they both really like him and his girlfriend.
My parents are very supportive of him and his girlfriend; I think this is testament to the sort of people they are because his behaviour, especially in his late teens/ early twenties, which involved drugs, the police and being violent to my mum, would have been enough for me to wash my hands of him completely.
Anyway, fast forward to now and although he is unable to hold down a permanent job, he is mostly employed in construction type roles. He and his girlfriend rent a nice little house and she is about to give birth to their first child.
I am absolutely filled with rage and I so, so wish I wasn’t. I feel that it was bad enough that my own childhood was ruined by him and that I have to share my parents with him even now but the fact that my children now have to share family attention, be just two of the grandchildren, rather than the only two and we have to include his child/ children in our lives in the final injustice.
I sound absolutely mental, don’t I? I honestly can’t even look him in the face and every time I think about the situation I want to cry, but that’s mainly because I know how awfully, disgustingly unreasonable I am being. Especially as he’s always believed, due to a health condition, that he would be unable to have children. I think the fact that he can has made this more of a surprise and I’m therefore caught even more unawares.
Can anyone suggest ways for me to get past this? At the moment, all I can think of is completely erasing him from my life and sacrificing any family time I’d have spent with my own parents. This will seem
strange to everyone, of course, including my own DH and daughters. I can’t sit there this Christmas with them and a new baby: I am just not a good enough person to swallow this down and get on with it.