THE ABUSIVE BROTHER

 

The Abusive Brother
Many of my readers ask me where I got the inspiration for Astrid's horrible uncle in Snow White.
I wish I could say that he is a character straight out of my imagination...But he is not. He was unfortunately inspired by my father's older brother.
A narcissistic pervert who was never an uncle to me, I never called him that, nor a brother to my father, in all that an older brother should be,  never been protective above all but horribly abusive.
The only thing that this character wanted was to humiliate us.  Fist my father and then me his only daughter as an extension of my father. This is something that with hindsight and the help of other people I have understood.

I have so much to say...The fact that I would see my schoolmates come back happy from a visit to their uncle was a mystery to me...The only thing I felt in his presence was fear and that characteristic tight feeling in my stomach. Because he was abusive in his words and actions.
To my father, to my mother,  and to me. He beat his children if they did not finish their plate or if they played in their baths instead of washing- 3-5 years old boy and girl together in the same tub- with the complicity of his wife who often went to ask him to do it. A couple of monsters a theme I explore in my last manuscript and screenplay.
As soon as we arrived in a room where he was already for a while, we could feel a tension as if people had been arguing.

He would even manipulate his children to say hurtful things to my mother.
Before I was born my mother gave birth to a stillborn child, an only child, I should have had a sister or perhaps never existed depending on my parents' plans.
Her daughter, who was about 3 years old at this time, asked my mother as she was still dealing with depression after this trauma.
"Why do children die in your womb?"
How would a child think of asking that  if she hadn't been told to do so by an adult?

For the wedding of this same girl I was requisitioned (for lack of a better word) to be a bridesmaid. They had no one else on hand...But even worse, this experience was another opportunity for them to humiliate me.
Dressed in a mere light blouse way toi light for the winter (they had asked it to supposedly match the other guests clothing) in the unbearable cold, I had to hold his daughter's dress for hours without being allowed to put on a coat to take pictures get in the car etc...
In the evening, when I returned in their house,  I discovered the place that had been allotted to me for the night, a sheet and a cushion on the floor next to my parents' bed.
Shocked, my father took my place and slept on the floor all night. He even smiles doing so.
All this had been joyfully orchestrated by him, his wife, his sister and her children.
Because the more those people saw us unhappy, the more they inflated their egos. It is the characteristic of the narcissistic perverts.

The worst occured when my father was sick in that horrible hospital.
His brother orchestrated everything from a distance, ordering his sister, who could not live without a male's domination, her husband, her sons, her brother. Her husband not being there, her elder brother was there to take his place in a perverse and manipulative unnatural relationship.
He first sent his sister to check that my father's condition was serious.
Then gloating over the positive answer he started to try to dominate us too and make the whole nightmare even worse... He sent his sister to a secret appointment with the doctors without us knowing it, I caught her going there on the street, in all likelihood to talk about euthanasia on my father according to the echoes that I had.
My mother and I were terrified to answer the phone for fear of hearing bad news...He knew it and was gloating, insulting us in the process.
Putting people down to the point of sending them into the abyss is his specialty...I still remember his mocking response to him" when my father talked to him about some issues he had." my poor little brother."
To belittle the other in order to better elevate oneself is the characteristic of narcissistic perverts.

The day my father passed my mother had not heard the phone ring. We were exhausted...I didn't check my email either but the monster had mine. He sent me an email with the misleading title "intensive care #3" to get me to open it, in which he bluntly announced my father's death.
He wanted me to be even more shocked when I found out (he had  given his number to the hospital to get the news he was so anxiously awaiting).
I didn't find out that way, but by finding my mother in tears in the living room.
For the funeral once again the monster was at its peak.
I was in deep shock and I could not go there, it was unbearable to me ...
It was planned that my mother find herself alone with my father during the whole ceremony. His sister did not get there, directed by her brother and his accomplices. (There must have been many phone talks about it prior to it.)
She who said one day that she dreamed of hitting me after assaulting me withher son(I am an independent woman, an artist, I write and I wear short skirts enough to hate me and above all I am her brother's daughter, I had to be humiliated, I'm not a girl who is supposed to rise but a girl who has to lose)... She is also a character in the book, the other one, the evil sister who walks with a stick for those who've read "Snow White".

My mother was left alone with my father in the chapel with the staff  desperately waiting for someone to arrivr but the family had not been notified of my Father's passing. Cousins uncles nobody we had to be punished by both monsters.
My mother accompanied my father in the hearse to the cemetery alone.
During the burial there was nobody but this sister, a funeral wreath sent by this elder brother that was obviously more a  sign of victory than a manifestation of mourning.

And my mother was escorted out by his sister with very harsh words, habits die hard.
Everything had been planned between this brother and sister for perhaps years organized by them manipulated to become a new trauma for us.
The couples of monsters are still the worst... And those went as far as to steal my father's funeral, the gathering, to satisfy some kind of sick planned revenge that was so obvious... Revenge against someone who's been trying hard to desobey a narcissistic pervert and escape his control.

Jordan