Welcome back to Tough Love with Abigail Shrier, the new advice column from The Free Press! Every Thursday, our contributing editor will address your conundrums, with no hesitation and no sugarcoating—just straight-up Tough Love. This week, Abigail answers a question from Julia (that’s not her real name), who’s considering severing ties with her brother because he won’t vaccinate his kids. To receive Tough Love directly in your inbox, every week, sign up here.
Dear Abigail,
I’m struggling with a painful family dilemma and I don’t know what’s left to try. My brother and his wife refuse to vaccinate their children—unless they’re forced to, like when their kids were kicked out of school for being unvaccinated, specifically for not having the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) jab. We’ve tried to be nonjudgmental in our questions and suggested compromises on ways we can interact, but every conversation feels like we’re speaking different languages.
This is part of a broader pattern of unsafe choices that make it hard to spend time together. My brother and his wife have driven more than once on the highway without putting their infant in a car seat because “he cries too much.” They also brought their kids, who had fevers, to our 100-year-old grandfather’s birthday party. Moments like these leave me feeling anxious, angry, and unsure whether I can trust them around my own family (I have three young children).
I love my brother, and I’ve always believed family should matter. But the disconnect in our values and basic safety standards feels enormous, and I’m starting to wonder if the healthiest choice is to step back. We don’t have a cool uncle willing to intervene; otherwise, I would go that route. So what do I do? Do I sever ties? Should I keep trying to reconcile or is it okay to accept that not all relationships can be fixed?
How do I navigate the guilt, the love, and the need to protect my own family?
Julia
Julia,
The first time I lost my little brother, he was 4. We were in our local Lord & Taylor, where he’d crept inside a fountain of racked clothing and ducked down so I wouldn’t see him. I tore through the racks, crying his name, until I found him smiling, thinking he had won this round of hide-and-seek.
A year later, at Prince George’s Plaza in Maryland, he ran off, fed up with me, and attempted to exit the mall on his own. A security guard stopped him at the door, figuring that a square-shouldered blond kindergartner wasn’t about to hail a cab on his own.
My freshman year at Columbia, I lost my brother at New York’s Penn Station, to which he’d arrived by Amtrak to visit me. Neither of us had cell phones and there’d been a last-minute track change. The timing was bad: the crowd, like an endless wall of coats. I pinballed through that vast and deafening space, wishing I’d picked a more specific landmark, hating myself for having failed him.
The earliest job I had in life was to be my brother’s keeper. “Where’s Danny?” was probably the most frequent question put to me as a kid, always with the expectation that I would know. He is three and a half years younger (to the day) and from the moment he was born, I was to be his ankle bracelet. His preservation, up to me.
That always feels like the job of sisters: to mother our brothers. It’s a hard habit to quit. Especially when you believe you’re right about so many things and he seems, to you, so obviously wrong.
But what I cannot understand is your suggestion that it might be a good idea to lose your brother on purpose. And over, sorry to say, fundamentally trivial matters, which prick your vanity, but otherwise scarcely impinge upon you at all.
I’m guessing you haven’t conducted your own randomized, double-blind vaccine trials, and neither has he. Like most people, you each listened, read, and ultimately decided whom to trust. There was nothing personal in his decision, nothing cruel, nothing that warrants an apology. Are you willing to toss out your brother because you picked different sides of a debate on which neither of you is especially qualified to render a judgment?
In 55 years, with any luck, you both may be alive. Your parents will be long gone. All of your beloved aunts, uncles, and teachers will be dead. Most older friends and cousins, just a memory. Your brother will be the single person left who has known you that long. The American Academy of Pediatrics will be heartened to learn that you chose to champion vaccine safety by discarding a relationship with your brother. Think the AAP will call you on your 90th birthday?
That your brother and sister-in-law would place their infant in a belt without a car seat (presumably on the lap of an adult—how else can an infant sit up?) is far from ideal. Would you like me to pretend that we didn’t all do this sort of thing all the time in the ’80s? We did. I was there. It was dumb. And yet, tens of millions of American kids lived to tell the story. If you don’t feel reasonably confident that your brother would buckle your own kids in, don’t let him drive them around.
As to your grandfather’s birthday party—Julia, I must insist on this—get a grip. An inevitable predicament when you have small children: You’ve purchased tickets for travel, arranged cover with work. You shower and throw on clothes, then wrestle the kids into their finest and pack up all their gear. Everyone’s in the car—surprise! Hayden feels warm. Does 99 degrees Fahrenheit count as sick? What about 100? Maybe it’ll go away. What was it the pediatrician said about how long a febrile kid is contagious?
Now, you’re forced to make a quick decision: Skip out on your family and miss Grandpa’s 100th birthday for a fever that could disappear by morning, or send a card and pray Grandpa makes it to 101.
Little kids are world-class germ carriers. The only way to avoid exposing older people to sickness is by banishing preschoolers from family occasions entirely. Your grandfather opted not to do so, presumably because he believes grandkids are kind of the point of his 100 years—that gathering the great-grandkids around him was worth risking rhinovirus. That’s an “unsafe choice,” too. A good one.
There’s an epidemic of family estrangement in this country. Young adults cut off relatives entirely. Bar parents from seeing their grandkids. Until I interviewed the wonderful clinical psychologist and author Joshua Coleman, who counsels parents who’ve been cut off by their adult children, I assumed that the parents must have done something truly awful to trigger this sort of rupture. But you are simply one more data point to the contrary. Today, parents and siblings are severed for reasons that would once have been considered simple disagreements. We worship choice in this society—and too often disparage features of our lives over which we have no say: our histories, our biological sex. And our families of origin.
Unless your brother poses a genuine danger—if he were in the throes of meth addiction, say—severing ties with him and his family is hideous and cruel. You ask whether there’s a way of reconciling with him. But the problem is not between the two of you but inside of you: between your own moral superiority and your sense that your brother has failed your various tests. Which isn’t his failure at all.
You speak of him as if he’s just a guy who takes foolish risks. You’ve decided to see him, in other words, as an employer might: a series of strengths and weaknesses to weigh before deciding whether to onboard him or round-file his résumé.
He’s your brother, Julia. Not some neighborhood rando you’ve reluctantly befriended.
Siblings hold our histories. They alone bear full witness to our childhoods. We know those childhoods were real because someone was there to see them. Without siblings, our own histories can seem shaky and doubtful—susceptible to fading like Marty McFly’s photograph in Back to the Future after a time-travel mishap made his birth unlikely.
Your brother isn’t someone you met on your journey to becoming the fabulously sophisticated, right-thinking you. He’s prior to that—the connection, deeper. He loves you in a way almost no one else does—despite his best instincts, regardless of the costs and benefits of your companionship, whether or not you deserve it.
Which, sometimes, you don’t. Judgmentalism—moral self-flattery in the guise of concern and discernment—runs through your letter like a vein of blue mold. It’s unlovely. And it is but one of the many reasons you’ve likely given your brother and sister-in-law occasion to resent you.
And yet, they manage to roll their eyes and press on with the business of family—of showing up, giving hugs, and being there. You do not suggest that your brother and his wife have ever been anything but open with and kind to you. That, itself, is a miracle. How many others would find themselves on the wrong end of your know-it-all-ism and be endlessly forgiving?
Just be a loving sister. Your brother’s a knucklehead sometimes (like every brother). And you’re an Olympic-caliber pain in the ass. He loves you anyway.
Love him anyway. And count your blessings. It is Christmas, after all.
Onward,
Abigail
Tough Love with Abigail Shrier will be back next Thursday. Paying subscribers can ask Abigail a question by clicking here. To get the column sent straight to your inbox, every week, click here.
In case you missed it, last week, a mom wrote Tough Love to ask if she should try to stop her 22-year-old daughter from getting married. Don’t miss Abigail’s reply here: