Most new friends I make will immediately hear about my dogs, then about my three adopted sisters from China, who are 20 years my junior. Possibly they will never hear about my estranged biological brother, Michael. But the people who have known me the longest have long been aware that he has not spoken to the majority of my family for the last 25 years.
Reading Brooklyn Beckham’s Instagram diatribe against his parents and all of the ensuing hot takes made me pause and reflect on our fascination with the lives of the famous and with reality TV., and on my own situation. Our collective obsession with family conflict and drama comes from a place of normalising the strife or conflict within our own social structures.
What Gen Zs call “going no-contact” gave a label to the estrangements in my own family that I rarely disclose, to those relatives that I no longer mention and will probably never see again.
A few years ago, during a memoir-writing class taught by the writer Cathy Retzinbrink, she was keen to stress that we should not be writing just to settle scores. That writing clearly skewed by heartbreak or other past ills, which characterises the other party as Machiavellian with no hope for redemption or reconciliation, is boring for the reader. I bet the Beckhams wish Brooklyn had sat in on that lesson, instead of confirming a feud that has been gossiped about in the press for years.
Everyone had a meme, or a joke or an opinion on these public figures that we have welcomed into our homes and lives since he was born. Yet the same thing happens in most of our families, albeit with a lot fewer memes. Who has hosted a wedding and not had to worry about who isn’t speaking to who, or who can’t be invited after sleeping with someone unsuitable in 1973?
I want to stress that our own family drama is down to Michael cutting ties with almost everyone, except for me, because I am the one who went no-contact with him. The decades of pettiness and hurt in that one declaration are like dried lava that I have built a life over, one that he has no part in. I could detail a litany of moments that led to this; I could quite easily paint him to be a monster, but that would not in any way help soothe the dynamic or situation.
When our mother was dying, we attempted for her peace of mind to be civil and repair the relationship. But without her around to play nice for, it has been healthier and easier to not have anything to do with him.
Part of that is the privilege of having lived my adult life abroad. Like Brooklyn Beckham, I have the means to for the most part avoid the gaping wound in my family. I don’t have to see Michael or his family every Sunday. I don’t have children, I live in another country and necessity doesn’t make our paths cross weekly, monthly or frankly ever again.
Suggested Reading
Lily Allen and the lie of Ethical Non-Monogamy
A friend says that one reason to maintain a difficult relationship with a sibling is that the pair of you survived and understand the specific insanity of your upbringing in a way that no one else will ever comprehend. And that shared experience, those shared moments, often create a shell or barrier that no one else can ever quite get.
And on the rare occasions when I still spoke to my brother, almost immediately our language around our parents was about “mommy and daddy”. Neither of us had called them mommy or daddy in over 30 years, yet when speaking to one another, that is unconsciously who they are to us. We are back to being children without control over who we’re forced to sit next to in the back seat of a car for thousands of miles.
These family rifts demand that people take sides, that there can be no Switzerland, that you either agree or are dead to me. In family fights, we all seem to think we are in Game of Thrones.
The Beckham feud makes it clear that all of the money in the world doesn’t stop bitter resentments. If it can happen in their fancy gilded lives, then it shouldn’t feel so shameful in our own living rooms.
Jamie Klingler is co-founder of Reclaim These Streets
