It's time to talk about Pascal
Round about the time I was twelve or thirteen, my parents decided that it would be a good experience, for our family, to have a foreign exchange student come live with us for a year. And since we three children were all relatively young, they selected a much older, eighteen-year-old, recent high school graduate from Belgium. He would attend our local high school and simply repeat his senior year.
Now for myself and my younger brother, age eleven, having an eighteen-year-old in the house was a new and exciting experience. He was older and foreign and cool, and we pretty much worshiped the kid. Well you would at that age, right?
However, our seven-year-old sister had a vastly different experience.
The problem was really two fold. First, my sister was a bit chubby and struggled with her self-esteem. This problem was heightened by the fact that my parents did not give two cents about the self-esteem of their children. They never did.
Second, this eighteen-year-old was an arrogant narcissist of the most cruel sort, and he mocked and belittled our sister at every chance he got. This, in itself, was a problem, but it was not the problem. No, the actual problem was that our parents never, not once, put a stop to it. You know basic stuff, for instance: Pascal, we do not speak to nor about a member of this family in such a way.
And the kid was relentless. Looking back on it, the proper course of action would have been to stop it, and if it could not be stopped, to send him home. This should have taken mere weeks.
But this was not done. In fact, nothing was done. So our sister suffered this bullying from within her own family for a year. And I think it is only fair to confess, that eleven and thirteen-year-old boys will mimic whatever an eighteen-year-old does in their house. So instead of contending with just one bully, my sister had to live with three of us.
Now, my brother and I were no where near as bad as Pascal. We knew our parents would step in if we were. But we were bad enough, and I'm sure my sister would say we, the three of us, were all the same. Remember, she was seven.
I don't think my sister ever got over it. Maybe she has, but we have never discussed it. But what I know for sure, is that we have never had a good relationship. Sometimes it has been better than others. But it has never been normal.
As smart as she is, one mistake my sister has made over the years is that she has always blamed the eighteen-year-old and the thirteen-year-old and the eleven-year-old. And I'm very sorry for the part I played in this. But to my knowledge she has never held my parents accountable for their inaction. Parental impunity has always been the hallmark of our family. This is their legacy and our long term tragedy.
In any case, my abnormal relationship with my sister is not one hundred percent Pascal's fault. I would say, perhaps not even mostly his fault. It primarily stems from the way my parents raised their children. In an abusive family, the kids either come together, fiercely loyal to one another, or they become divided. For us, it was the latter.
My theory is that when an abused child is not the current target of abuse, he cannot help but be relieved. That is, if abuse is bad enough, a young child is simply grateful that it is not him...this time. It becomes every kid for himself. This degrades trust, and does nothing for long term family cohesion.
Pascal just fueled this preexisting dynamic. But he was a monster, and it was something else our sister had to endure.
The internet reports that he died during early Covid. Naturally, no one in my family shared this with me, even though he died over four years ago. So-called experts speciously advise estranged families to cut all lines of communication and information; one is simply in or one is out. This is the choice they have made, as if I am the one responsible for our estrangement. Somehow they seem to believe that they hold the moral high ground, when I have done nothing but recoil from their behavior.
Anyway, I learned about Pascal's death yesterday. At the time of his death, he was fifty-nine years old.
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