My Father Fought Fascists. My Brother Voted for One.

My parents, early on

I love my brother.

I just don't know if I like him.

We were raised by the same parents.

Not in the same circumstances.

Not by the same version of them.

To understand how two people can grow up in the same family and end up believing they're living in different Americas, you have to understand the people who raised us.

The Immigrant and the War Years

My dad was an immigrant. Today, people who share my brother's politics might dismiss him with two words: illegal alien.

Instead, he built a life here. Without him, none of us would exist.

His German-born mother left her husband in rural Canada in 1921 and came to Los Angeles with two young boys. She turned their house into a boarding house to survive, and by thirteen my dad was throwing papers for the Los Angeles Times before school to help support the family.

On his first day of high school he showed up wearing knickers—perfectly normal where he'd come from, humiliating in Los Angeles.

He never forgot what it felt like to be the outsider.

He worked his ass off, became a citizen in 1937, then fought in World War II.

While he was overseas, my mom stretched rabbit stew with vegetables from the victory garden. She rented rooms to women whose husbands were overseas. They saved scraps, went without, and did what needed doing.

Long before they had opinions about politics, they had opinions about survival.

My Mother’s America

My mom grew up in Ponca City, Oklahoma, in a big Irish Catholic family at a time when the Klan held real power.

Her father's store was burned to the ground when she was young. She used to tell a story about sitting beside him in a wagon as he pointed out a family she wasn't supposed to visit, even though she knew the little girls.

Not long afterward, he died, leaving her mother to raise ten children alone.

She learned early how to read a room—who was safe, who wasn't, what could be said out loud, and what had to stay quiet.

There wasn't much money. There wasn't much safety.

But there was music.

At family gatherings, the furniture was pushed aside, fiddles came out, and the grown-ups danced late into the night. The little kids fell asleep on piles of coats in the corner.

Joy and fear lived together in the same house.

As a teenager, she'd sneak across town to hear live bands and dance, even when she wasn't supposed to be there. Years later, she still used words she'd learned as a child.

Words that made my stomach turn.

Looking back, I think she spent her whole life trying to balance the world she inherited with the one she wanted to build.

People are complicated like that.

She quietly welcomed people others looked down on. She also carried prejudices she never questioned.

Both things were true.

That's part of what I've had to make peace with.

From Brentwood to Pico Boulevard

My parents married in their twenties and, little by little, worked their way up—from a modest house in Los Angeles to one in Brentwood.

Then my dad got sick, and everything they'd spent years building unraveled. They sold the house and bought the Holiday Motel, a run-down place on Pico Boulevard and 11th.

My mom thought she could turn it into a nice little place close to the beach.

It remained the kind of place you wouldn't brag about owning.

Or living in.

My oldest siblings remembered Brentwood. The three youngest of us never knew it.

Same parents.

Different childhoods.

The carpet was worn, the rooms smelled of stale smoke, and paint peeled from the walls.

Tenants paid by the week if they could, by the day if they couldn't.

Some paid by the hour.

Looking back, I don't think moving changed who my parents were.

It changed what they saw every day.

The people who walked through our front door weren't lawyers or executives anymore. They were families trying to hang on. Veterans. New immigrants. People one missed paycheck away from losing everything.

It changed what my siblings and I saw, too.

Not equally.

Not at the same ages.

Not in the same ways.

Different Versions of the Same Parents

The truth is, my older siblings grew up with different parents. They got the war years. The ration books, the scrap drives, and the mother who rented rooms to women and children whose husbands were fighting overseas.

My middle sister was her own story. Seven years separated her from the sibling above and the sibling below. She started her life in Brentwood, then was uprooted to the motel and apartment when everything fell apart. That kind of shift marks you.

I was just a toddler when we moved down the socioeconomic ladder. The three youngest of us never knew life in Brentwood at all.

By the time we came along, our parents had already lived a few lifetimes. They had seen too much, built too much, and lost too much. I think they were just plain tired.

On the way to school, my dad took detours to the ocean, dropping us off late more often than not. I can't count how many times we missed the Pledge of Allegiance or walked in halfway through it.

The six of us inherited the same family history.

We didn't inherit the same family.

Not really.

The People Around Us

Once our family moved to the motel, the people around us changed, too.

My dad kept a daily tally of rent due in red and rent paid in black, and there was always more red than black—something my parents fought over on what felt like a nightly basis.

Across the street from the motel was Fred Tanaka's car-repair shop. Fred, a survivor of Hiroshima, built a new life far from Japan, raised his children, and sent each of them to college. He and my dad yacked almost every day.

Two men who had seen too much, trying to make something decent out of what was left.

The Family Divide

The world outside our front door had changed.

The world inside it hadn't changed nearly as much.

My three brothers got the loans, the gifts, and the quiet help that let them start businesses and build wealth. My sisters and I got quiet expectations to look good, be self-reliant, and, for me, to be practical. We learned to worry about our weight, chase perfection, and not ask for too much.

After my parents died, the pattern didn't end. It calcified. The money that was supposed to bind us as a family split us instead. Every unspoken resentment, every small favoritism, every patriarchy-soaked decision came out into the open.

It's strange, realizing that the people who taught me to stand up for others never learned how to stand up for their daughters.

What They Left Us

I don't know if it's possible for me to like my brother. I do know that I love him. That distinction matters.

We came from the same mother's body. We share the same family history. But we didn't live the same version of it.

Love, I've learned, doesn't always require closeness or agreement. Sometimes it asks for limits. Sometimes it asks for space. Sometimes it asks you to let go of the version of connection you hoped for so you can keep breathing.

They believed in decency, in honesty, and in helping people when it would have been easier to look away.

They didn't wave flags or call it patriotism.

They just did what they believed was right.

What Was Passed Down

My oldest sister, who is a year older than my oldest brother, learned something different. She took me to protests when I was a kid. She talked to me about power, about war, and about what it meant to resist quietly and out loud. She is part of the reason I fight back and don't give up.

So it isn't just about the years when my siblings started their lives.

It's about what each of us learned to notice.

What each of us learned to protect.

And what each of us learned to ignore.

We were raised in the same family.

We didn't inherit the same lessons.

I try to hold onto that, even when it feels completely impossible.

Because somebody has to remember what they actually fought for.

Disclaimer: Reading this blog isn’t the same as therapy. If you’re struggling, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional — you don’t have to do this alone.