I have a teenage half brother from my dad who I barely know and I feel so guilty about it. How do I communicate with him without ruining his idea of who my dad is?

This is my first time posting here so please forgive the lengthy context. It’s hard to describe my situation without laying out as many details as possible. I’m 23/f, my brother is 16ish and we’ve really only known each other for about four or five years. —-

I’ve never really had a relationship with my father. He lived out of state my entire life. He dropped in for visits every other year when I was under age 7, and then I flew to visit him and his parents maybe three times from age seven to age ten. I stopped talking to him after that because he kept promising to visit and then would give me excuses about not having enough money while making no secret of his new motorcycle or global travels. I was smart, he was not.

When I was 15/16 I tried to reconnect. We exchanged lengthy emails for a few weeks. My mom knew about this, and she was also peripherally in contact with him without me knowing. One day she left her email open and I found an exchange between them which revealed he had been hiding his second child from me. I had a 12 year old brother.

I was livid that he had kept that from me for my brother’s whole life, so I cut off contact from him again.

When I was 19 I was accepted to a college in the last city I knew my father had lived in. I was given a large scholarship, so I moved there with my ex, about 25 minutes from where he lived. I let him know, but we made no efforts to visit with each other for several months.

Then I tried again. I think we saw each other twice before he introduced the idea of flying my brother up to meet me. I visited the place that my dad lived, an auto shop. He lived in a shed on the property. No kitchen, no bathroom, and the place was a mess. It was then that I realized my brother couldn’t stay with him, he’d have to stay with me. With tickets already purchased, I was starting to feel overwhelmed but excited to meet him. I made him a playlist of music I loved when I was his age based on the music he was currently into. I got my tiny apartment ready and had him meet my boyfriend, who I lived with, through facetime a few times before he visited so he didn’t feel too uncomfortable.

My brother arrived and my dad had the worst way of introducing us - he picked the kid up from the airport and came to pick me up so we could go on a hike and get lunch. Inexplicably and without warning, my dad also brought along one of his friends and the guy’s kid around my brothers age. So I got into the backseat of this car where my brother and this kid were sitting, talking to each other, barely even noticing I had gotten in the car. And that was it. That’s how I met my brother for the first time. We went on the hike. Picture this: my dad and his friend chatting together on the trail, my brother and the other kid about fifty feet ahead, and me, alone, trailing behind. After the hike, he dropped me and my brother off at my house...and left. Kid has type 1 diabetes and night terrors, and I was 19 living with a shitty boyfriend. I had no idea how to navigate this, and for the next six days, neither of us heard anything from our dad. I did my best to keep my brother entertained and my ex helped him with the shots he had to give himself. My dad dumped the kid with me and didn’t ever follow up or check in on us or try to spend any time with us at all. (It was the same thing he had done to me when I would visit him as a kid. He’d spend one out of seven days with me while keeping me stashed at his parents house, and my grandma would grasp at straws to keep me occupied while my grandpa was verbally abusive and unloving.) On the sixth day I sent him some angry texts, asking him why he wasn’t around at all, my brother wanted to see him. He called me, yelling. He called me all kinds of names which I’ve blacked out of my memory and can no longer recall, and told me to grow the fuck up. I think I screamed at him that I hate him, which I still feel. I was sobbing in front of my brother, which made him have a meltdown that I tried desperately to comfort him through. He was heartbroken that this little family he thought he was going to have was just as broken as the family he came from. I couldn’t fix it. When my dad came to get my brother to drive him to the airport, I think I told my dad that he was an irresponsible POS and that he didn’t deserve me in his life. I’m 23 now and haven’t spoken to him since.

Without telling me, my dad moved to the state my brother lives in a couple years ago. My brother still tries to keep in contact with me. It’s hard. We come from different worlds, he’s a teenage boy who loves anime and skating and doesn’t know how to hold a conversation but wants to. He still wants to visit me, he begs me to visit him which terrifies me because my brothers mom as well as my dads current girlfriend (a complete random stranger to me) have reached out to me on social media to insist I try again with my dad and if I went down there I strongly believe they would corner me into a situation with him without my consent. I don’t know them at all and they only know my dad’s idea of our history. I feel so guilty that I can’t stay regularly in contact with my brother. He tells me things about my dad that stress me out and trigger me. It sounds like my dad is sort of trying to fulfill the father role for my brother but falls short extremely often, and that’s a rollercoaster that absolutely sends me into a depression episode. It’s hard to stay connected with my brother, and so I just don’t really try.

Also, my dad is a compulsive liar, and I fear he’s telling my brother lies about me or about our past. I’ve never known him to tell the truth about anything. I’ve also always known him to blame everything that goes wrong between us on my mom which was especially disorienting when I was 15/16 reconnecting with him, and he could do something similar to my brother about me who is now around that age.

How do I connect with my brother? How do I talk to him? I want to have a good relationship with him and I want to be somebody he trusts, but I also need to set boundaries, and at the same time I don’t want to ruin whatever illusion he has of my father with my own perspective. And I fear I would have to explain my perspective to him in order to set up boundaries. I don’t know if he’s emotionally mature enough to handle this shit, or if he’s just better off with me being a distant sister.

TLDR; my distant father hid my younger brother from me for over a decade, forced a relationship between us in a haphazard and thoughtless way and now my connection with my brother is more sad than it was before we knew about each other because it’s so hard for us to know how to talk to each other. He always wants to talk to me, but he never has anything to say. He loves me but doesn’t know me, and I don’t know how to get to know him safely.

Submitted December 26, 2019 at 08:05PM by Dogphones https://ift.tt/351IroO