By Adam Crohn

As much as I’d like to make the fans of the 90s sitcom happy by talking about the show, Family Matters, what I’ve got for you here is more about the three-hour phone call I had with my mother last night than Steve Urkle and the Winslow family. But I will grant you all this little-known trivia fact about the famous sitcom. My second favorite TV show of all time is the show that birthed the well-known couch potato declaration, TGIF! Perfect Strangers debuted in 1986 to what would become the show that led the Friday night monster line-up of sitcoms we all ushered in the weekend with. And concealed within the cast of Perfect Strangers was the small but powerful character of Harriette Winslow, played by Jo Marrie Payton, who went on to co-star as the mother in the official Perfect Strangers spin-off, Family Matters.

If you’ve never seen Perfect Strangers, give it a shot. In short, it’s about two people who couldn’t be more distant cousins, related by the thinnest of familial threads, who eventually become absolute best friends because, to them, family matters. The show is a riot and imparts some very meaningful lessons on family dynamics. But now on to that three-hour phone call with my mom that you’ve all been dying to hear about.

Just now I started to type “We all have a family…”, but that’s not necessarily true in the sense of blood relatives. But a family can be more than that. Friends can be family. You may have a work family that means just as much to you as anyone’s brother or sister may. Even animals can be the family that gets you through your days, listening to the garbage you have to put up with at work. And no matter what family you have, they matter.

I always talk about how lucky I was to have the childhood I had. My mom and dad did everything they could for my brother and sister and I, and my brother and sister and I got along relatively well. We played together, went to school together, and traveled together. We ate all our meals together, and my parents treated and loved us three kids fairly equally. And I look back on my childhood as something I’d love to pass on to my own kids someday. I learned a lot from my family and still do.

But things don’t always stay the way they used to be, or how you may have envisioned them being as an adult. Family dynamics change. People change, sometimes in ways you can’t understand no matter how hard you try. But family still matters.

My brother and sister are my two best friends. Unfortunately, my sister lives 700 miles away, and with her own family, we don’t get to see each other nearly as often as we’d like. But we do our best to keep up, we talk at least a couple times a week, text almost every day, and if there’s a political debate or some big to-do on the news, we usually watch it together, texting each other ridiculous commentary about flies landing on old men’s heads. She’s one of the best people I’ll ever know.

But my brother and I have always had a unique relationship. We have always been into the same movies and music. We started a band together that began our mutual love for being musicians. We’re both into the same comic books and toys, and we’re both artists and writers. We both live in or near Chicago and have for almost 20 years, so we usually try to see each other as often as possible. We even worked together for the last year and a half. But a few months ago we had a bit of a falling out. But he’s family and he matters.

I’m not going to go into what the falling out was about, but it was big and dramatic, which isn’t either of our style, and especially not mine. It resulted in my having a panic attack in the moment, something that has happened to me before but only a few times, and only when I’ve experienced a big loss. It was a very strange argument that, for me, came out of nowhere and I still don’t fully understand where he was coming from. And we still haven’t recovered from it. But he still matters.

I usually tell my mom everything. She’s always been a confidant for me, a fair and neutral ear to vent or bounce ideas off of. But I decided to keep this thing between my brother and me from her, mostly because I felt it would break her heart to hear that her sons hadn’t spoken to each other in months. But last night I came clean. For some reason, I felt it was time and she needed to know. But that was only about an hour of the three-hour phone call. The rest was about girl woes and me not having a job. Typical parent-child stuff. But when I told her about my brother, she was the same old mom I’ve always had, even more so in some ways. I know she hated to hear it, but she was glad I confided in her. And together we worked through some of the muck that had been pooling in my head since the incident. Something I sorely needed, and another reason I’m lucky to have my family.

The larger point I’m trying to make here is that my brother doesn’t have what I have with our family. But he doesn’t have it by choice, which I can’t for the life of me wrap my head around. Over the years he’s intentionally distanced himself from my mom and dad, and though my sister and he get along fine, he doesn’t really keep up with her. And I believe he suffers for it.

There are so many folks out there who never had a family, or lost their family too soon, who would do just about anything to have that. To have a trusting ear just a phone call away that will just listen to anything and everything you have and need to say. People who always have their door open for you to walk through with your muddy shoes or way too many comic books. But they’ll also tell you what you need to hear, which may not be what you want to hear. And that’s something I think everyone can benefit from.

I find myself at a real impasse with this thing between my brother and me. It’s harder than I thought it would be to be like him and distance myself from a family member, even just for a bit. A few years ago, I went through the hardest loss I’ve ever known, and I literally wouldn’t be typing right now if not for my brother. And now my brother is going through something hard. I know that’s what was at the crux of our disagreement. And not only do I want to be there for him, but he deserves that from me. But I don’t know how, and in many ways, he’s not letting me. And I’m worried that this is the beginning of our relationship heading down the same road that he’s steered his relationships with my mom and dad down.

Which is the bigger concern for me. Parents never get younger, and our dad is 74 and a 55-year smoker who has gone through several different kinds of cancer treatment over the past few years. Dad’s a whole other blog post, but to sum him up, he’s a stubborn curmudgeon and old-school guy who stopped learning new things 20 years ago, and I love him. He gave his family everything we ever could have needed growing up and continues to do so. But for reasons no one really knows, my brother won’t talk to him. And that kills me, for my dad and for my brother, because someday he won’t be here, and I’d hate for their relationship to end in a cliché. Family matters.

I mentioned my brother and I are both big dorks, potty-trained with comics, and huge Star Wars fans. In fact, our dad took us to see our first in-theater Star Wars movie in 1983, and that was Return of the Jedi. And as I write this, I’ve got Star Wars Episode IX on in the background. The scene where Chewie finds out that Leia died just played and I teared up seeing his reaction to the loss of his family. And, not that he did this, but it reinforces the fact that you never want to wait until it’s too late to tell someone in your family that they matter. My brother should tell our dad that, I should tell my brother that, and we should all go on a Caribbean cruise and get food poisoning together to close the deal. Because family matters.