Brotherhood

 It’s time I wrote about my brother, Jaxon.

This isn’t meant to shame anyone—but it is time to be honest. Time to bring things into the light. I’ve been wrestling with the meaning of family—what it is, what it was—and what it has cost. That struggle has brought me, unavoidably, to Jaxon.

You may know him as 'Dan' or 'Daniel.'  He changed his name some years ago from Daniel Fitch to Jaxon Ravens.

Trying to make sense of our relationship is difficult. There’s no clean thread to follow—just a tangle of memory, grief, and bewilderment.

About ten years ago, I was going through a divorce—one that defied simple labels like “amicable” or “messy.” My ex had entered a new relationship before she found the courage to tell me. She decided she wanted to move across the country with our son. It was, to say the least, a deeply destabilizing time. In the midst of the custody proceedings, my father died—and then, within a week, my brother Kevin passed too. It was a devastating period. I was unmoored.

My father, a photographer of civil rights leaders and cultural moments, had donated much of his work to Stanford shortly before his death. He left the modest proceeds—and his remaining possessions, including his prints and personal items—to be divided equally among his three living children: Jaxon, our older half-sister, and me.

At the time, I was living in Los Angeles. Jaxon was in Seattle. We met in the Bay Area to settle our father’s affairs and to hold memorials for both Dad and Kevin. I had come prepared to take on the practical burdens: I installed a hitch on my battered Crown Vic so I could haul a U-Haul trailer filled with my father's belongings—prints, instruments, recording gear, a canoe, even a car.

Neither Jaxon nor our sister brought anything to transport items. I assumed, given the circumstances, that I was temporarily acting as caretaker of what our father left behind. I packed the prints—images of King, Chavez, Dorothy Day, and lesser-known faces that made up my father’s body of work—while Jaxon took friends, and my son, to the beach to scatter our father’s ashes. Later he mentioned that he had gifted some prints to friends. He didn’t specify which ones, nor whether he’d consulted our sister.

Back in Los Angeles, I became the quiet steward of these artifacts. Though my father’s photographs were made public domain—he had always said they were “borrowed” from their subjects and should be returned—their emotional significance remained intact. I didn’t see urgency in redistributing them. They moved with me from apartment to apartment, finally landing in a secured closet when I settled in Seattle. I hung three on my wall—ones that had always hung in my father’s home. Familiar. Meaningful.

Years passed in silence on the topic—no questions, no offers of help, no mention of the photos from either sibling.

Then one summer, Jaxon reached out, ostensibly to coordinate plans with my son during his visit. I assumed he wanted to plan a trip with us—something outdoors, as we often did. But I soon realized that he wasn’t asking to join us—he was trying to find out when we’d be gone. He proposed coming into my home while we were away to “catalog” the photographs.

The pretense alarmed me. After years of no engagement on the subject, his sudden interest—and the method by which he pursued it—raised every red flag. I told him no, but assured him I’d prioritize organizing the collection in the fall, once my son was back with his mother.

He did not take that well.

What followed was pressure, then demands. He began sending curt messages insisting I return a ukulele and a bottle of rum—items he claimed I’d borrowed or consumed. I returned them. Then I documented every photograph, created a full catalog, and shared it with both siblings. Still—nothing from our sister. Jaxon, however, escalated.

He began sending daily emails. The same message, over and over: “Where are Dad’s photos and what have you done with them?” Every day. For over a year and a half. Not a mass-mail automation. He was sending them manually, obsessively. A ritual of suspicion. A practice of hostility.

Never once did he pick up the phone. Never once did he say, “Let’s talk.”

Instead, he leaned further into pressure tactics—persistent, exacting, and devoid of empathy. I responded with transparency. This was during the height of the pandemic, which made physical meetings difficult, but I offered to coordinate a virtual conversation. I even offered to fly our sister out. I shared all updates and emails.

He did not engage.

Then something unsettling happened. My son and I were walking through a thrift store parking lot when a car pulled up beside us. We looked up—it was Jaxon. He saw us, made eye contact…and then accelerated away, fast, kicking up dust behind him. My son, around ten at the time, looked up at me and asked, “Was that Uncle Jack? Why did he do that?”

A fair question.

Eventually, I had enough. I told both siblings: if we didn’t meet to discuss distribution, I would divide the collection myself. There was no more room for endless deferral, and I no longer wanted to carry the emotional burden of stewardship alone—especially as it was being twisted into an accusation.

I sorted the photos into three groups. I kept three pieces—the same ones that had hung in my home for years. The rest I split between my siblings, giving the majority to Jaxon, as he seemed the most invested in the outcome. I placed his collection in a storage unit and gave him the code. He retrieved them within hours.

Still, it wasn’t over.

Despite refusing to participate in any collaborative process, he declared my distribution illegitimate. On my birthday, he sent a long message accusing me of violating state and federal law. He claimed my home would be searched, that I was harboring stolen property, and that I could face arrest and fines of up to $10,000.

Then, the night before Thanksgiving, he escalated further—sending a similar email to me and to my friends, asserting that I was a liar and a thief. He warned them that if they had any prints from me, they were now in possession of stolen goods.

The response I got from friends? Concern. Not for me—but for him.

I reached out to my estranged mother, thinking she should know her son might be struggling mentally. Her reply? “You and your brother have obviously had a falling out. You should talk.”

A masterclass in ignoring the obvious. And perhaps a glimpse into a family dynamic I’ve only recently begun to recognize.

Then, on Christmas Eve, another message—more accusations, and a new low: he invoked our dead brother, Kevin, and our father, saying they would be ashamed of me.

All this, after receiving the vast majority of the photographs.

I tried. I held the line with boundaries that anyone would find reasonable. I acted with integrity. But the fallout was heartbreaking. Friendships were lost. I can only imagine the narratives he spun to others—if he sent those kinds of emails to people close to me, what might he have said in private, behind closed doors?

This kind of sustained hostility leaves marks. I’m sad—for what was lost, and for who he’s become. I worry for him. There are signs of instability, maybe even substance issues—something my sister once quietly suggested.

But I’ll never really know. Because there’s no way back that I can see.

Some conflicts aren’t meant to be resolved. Some stories don’t get a reconciliatory ending.

And that has to be enough.

Mother’s Day

I am estranged from my mother.

She once said—though not to me directly, but loud enough for me to hear—that I “want nothing from her.” What she meant was that I refused the gifts she offered. A more accurate statement would be: I declined what was on offer.

Because of course I wanted something from her. She’s my mother.

But I’ve come to accept that she lacks the capacity to offer the things I truly needed—empathy, forgiveness, grace, humility, and above all, love. The gifts I longed for were never on the table. And the ones she did extend—plane tickets, event options for my son—were never given freely. They were conditional, transactional. They required me to engage in a kind of emotional barter, to name and acknowledge the price of what I was receiving.

That always felt wrong to me. Dirty. Weighted. A gift, in my understanding, should be freely given—not something I’d be made to pay for later, emotionally or otherwise. My instincts told me that accepting anything would come at a cost I wasn’t willing to bear. And so, I declined.

Saying “He wants nothing from me” is easier for her than asking why I didn’t accept. Because the answer is complicated—and painful. The truth is, the emotional toll of accepting her gifts always felt far too steep. I learned, over time, that nothing came free.

There are many reasons we’re estranged, but this—this dynamic of withholding and debt—is central.

Children often hope to inherit something meaningful from their parents—not just wealth or property, but a legacy of care. A foundation of love. A sense that, “My parents built something for me because they believed in me.”

But the equity I needed—emotional, not material—was never invested in me. That account is empty. And when I finally accepted that, I stopped trying. Or maybe I stopped hoping. I’ll never really know if she ever tried at all.

Meanwhile, my brother—calculating, obsessive—has ensured he inherited all the tangible family assets. The house I lived in with her while he was away at college, the house where she drank herself into unconsciousness in the basement—its years of appreciation in the Seattle real estate market now belong solely to him, although he never lived there as a child. He made sure of it. He guards his stake with threats and vitriol, daring anyone to challenge him. It’s a fight I’ve chosen not to have.

If it was ever a contest: you win, brother. I just hope you find peace in those bricks and deeds, because greed and malice extract their own price in time.

As for me, I reached a point where I simply couldn’t keep engaging with this version of family. My mother’s offers—however well-intentioned—were too fraught. Gifts that required negotiation, measurement, a receipt of worth. I would rather go without than bring that weight into my relationship with my son.

I would have told her that.

I would have told her that I remember the years in high school I spent alone while she drowned in her sadness and wine. I remember sometimes forging my own permission slips, or praying no one would notice her shaky drunken handwriting or bizarre phrasing: “I suppose I’ll have to let him go on this field trip.”

She may have quit drinking, but she never said, “I’m sorry.” That’s a gift I would have cherished.

I would have told her how hard it was to raise myself at 15 in a new city while she disappeared into bottles. I would have told her that.

And the truth is—I would love to be seen. To be valued. To be part of a family that prized kindness over status, compassion over piety. I would love to be acknowledged for surviving what I did, for making it through without serious harm, for earning a master’s degree and a meaningful life surrounded by love.

That kind of recognition—freely offered—would have meant everything.

I would love to be able to say “Happy Mother’s Day” and mean it. To look at my parent and know we had endured something together—and that they were proud of me, the way I am proud of my son.

But that’s not my experience.

Instead, her defenses, her denial, her shame and victimhood fill the space between us. I tried counseling. Paid for it. She came to one session and spent it reciting my flaws. I tried taking her out to dinner once, more recently, and the silence between us was deafening. Maybe there is no path back. Maybe I walked away, and maybe she slammed the door behind me.

So I turn instead to the mothers in my life.

To my son’s mother, who deserves to be celebrated.

To my colleagues—elementary teachers who spend their days nurturing not only their own children but everyone else’s.

To the moms who give freely, who love with abandon, who show up every day with patience, humility, and kindness.

To the single moms, the moms with big families, the new moms, the soccer moms, the hippie moms, the mama bears.

You are the ones doing the real work.

The material things? They’re secondary. You already know that.

I see you, mothers—and despite my personal experience, I honor the way you raise your children, and sometimes all our children, with the things they truly need: grace, compassion, and love.