Emotional Problems

My parents are getting ready for a wedding. They both look wonderful. The groom of said wedding is the child of a relative. Because my great-great grandfather busied himself with three wives, the hows and whys of how we are related to the groom are long, obtuse, and kinda creepy.

My dad and I were watching the Dodgers vs Cardinals game, and he asked if I wanted to go to the wedding. To be honest, I barely know the groom. I am sure there will be oodles of my extended family, people I see only rarely and who spend their time quizzing me about grad school, the plight of education, and why the shit I don't have a job. Boo.

Anyway, the younger brother of the groom has emotional problems (that is what my dad tells me.) This kid was supposed to be watching his grandmother--this all took place three or four years ago--who was very old and in need of constant help. When he took a small break from his post, his grandmother had a massive stroke and died. Upon returning to his post, the kid found his dead grandmother and, to put it in my dad's words, got his brain all screwed up for awhile. Now, each time any enquires about this kid it is always about his emotional problems.

Emotional problems? I am not sure I understand what exactly these are? Each emotion, it seems to me, has problems as built in mechanisms for use. Or consider confliction--two or so emotions dueling it out for optimum performance space. Consider paradigm and paradox. To say problems in the context of a young man who finds his grandmother dead on his watch, not to mention the guilt and shame imbued with such an experience, and who the fuck wouldn't get caught in an avalanche of emotions? Does this necessarily mean that the young man is different from any one of us with emotions that flare, spout, appear like sirens to sing us to a lovely pain? He is troubled, for sure, but certainly not in the GIRL INTERRUPTED sort of a way (as a sidebar, those girls--except for the one that kept chickens under her bed--weren't all the messed up either) but again, who the hell wouldn't be? To demarcate him as the son with emotional problems is to ridicule and couch his grief, frustration, guilt, anger....in a kind of sado/masochistic cocoon, one that he will inhabit alone, gripping at his emotions as if they were poisoned-tipped arrows he must handle with care--believe me, there the warning signs all over. But I take issue with him having emotional problems, or the way in which that makes him the damaged goods to the rest of his family that aren't.........really?.....? I know some stories, I believe we all have emotional problems, all of us, not because of any inability or weakness or slight, but because emotions are problematic just as they are. And we are problematic just as we are.

I hope his brother has a good wedding.