raveneye

I'm stressed out, pretty much in tears half the time, can't sleep to save my life because I'm worried about my brother and our family . . . .

We were celebrating his birthday, we played guitar, sang, the kids played together, had a long nice talk about everything. His wife before dinner had a couple martinis, then a couple glasses of wine during dinner, and then was drinking vodka shots after dinner for about an hour or so. She's about 5'5' and medium build, and doesn't eat much.

There was a disagreement about some minor thing, no big deal, as I was talking with my bro, and then suddenly his wife just went completely absolutely barking mad. She was completely out of control, in a rage, accusing us of all sorts of things, calling me a fucking idiot, fucking lunatic, fucking out of my mind, putting her face right up against mine, nose to nose, and screeching at me, dragging up stuff from the past 10 years about stuff she's been wanting to tell us, making outrageous accusations, saying essentially we were out to take advantage of her, my parents like my wife more than they like her, all sorts of ridiculous stuff that was just out of the blue. It was night and day, one second normal and the next just completely insane, a monster. If she had been holding something sharp I would have been out the door and down the block . . . .

My brother just sort of looked glum the whole time and stared at his feet, didn't do anything except say things like "Honey, you don't need to say that, isn't that a bit of an exaggeration?"

It was traumatic, my wife and I left, she in tears, with our 5 year old daughter who came with her two cousins out of the bedroom to see what was going on. I did not lose my temper at all, I was just basically in shock, tried to reason with her for about 10 minutes then gave up and just said I'm sorry we're leaving now. We explained to our daughter that she was sick.

This is not the first time she's done something like this. I have heard from mutual friends that she's done this before to them, and my dad said it happened to him too recently, and he had to push her away, and she called and apologized the next day. I hadn't thought much about it until now.

But here's the deal: I was very upset and concerned about it and went to my dad to talk about it, saying that she seems to be an alcoholic tyrant and he's covering for her, and I wonder how often this happens and I'm worried about their kids etc.

Then the next thing I heard is that my dad talked to my brother about what I said and my brother was absolutely infuriated and told my dad that "everything" I said about that night was a "complete lie". I'm shocked that my brother is calling me a liar, for the first time in my life.

Our parents now don't know who to believe. They don't want to be in the middle of this and don't want to hear any more about it, say it's something between the four of us and it's up to us to resolve it. They're not taking sides either way. I think that's understandable, but eventually wrong because it amounts to tiptoeing around her and the problem.

Was I in the wrong for bringing this up with my dad (result being: everybody in the family now knows about it)? Maybe I should just apologize to my brother and forget about it; it's his problem 99% of the time, not mine (we live on opposite coasts). But it could escalate and somebody could get physically hurt.

I guess the question is: keep tiptoeing around the problem and maybe keep some kind of relationship with my brother, or not back down, and risk breaking the family apart? Or something in between? Has anybody gone thru this, I need a reality check.