Siblings

I’m continuing the weekly exercise, intending to keep this up for 52 weeks, as I recount a wee piece of the story of my life.

This week’s prompt: How has your relationship with siblings changed over the years?

I have two sisters. Karen is about 2.5 years younger than I am; Beth, about 5.5.

As I ponder from this point at age 62, I don’t know that we grew up in a “close knit” family. Pop focused much of his attention and energy (and heart) on his church work. Mom needed to work odd jobs to make ends meet — sewing classes, Avon lady, and eventually full-time public school teaching. We were together at church twice each Sunday. We never wanted for food. But family holidays were frugal travels. And I don’t have a strong recollection of board game nights, or jigsaw puzzles together, or family traditions such as my friends the Macams and their gingerbread house and Easter egg family challenges.

And I had my music, which increasingly took time as I moved through my teenage years. I also, during season, kept statistics for the high school basketball team, and eventually lettered (!) as a statistician. Looking back, I bet this was also in a search for male approval or companionship, but I’ll unpack that with a therapist, perhaps.

I tormented my sister Karen. Three years apart in school, with diverging interests in some ways, we were a classic older brother/younger sister relationship. She always seemed to be angry about something, at least in my memory. I could always get her mad. And I often did.

With Beth, I was perhaps more protective, as she was the sickly one (not in a Victorian sense, but certainly the least robust of the family). And Beth, at six years behind me in school, was always at a different emotional and developmental level than I was as a kid.

But sibling relationships change, as do others. Mom and Dad decided to go be missionaries when Karen was just married, I was independent, and Beth was in her first year of college. That drew us closer together; we were now effectively orphaned.

In addition, we also started forging separate lives that did not center around a family home. I was starting to own my sexual orientation, but keeping this apart from my sisters. Karen was having kids. Beth finished college and started building her own life as a teacher in Harrisonville, with her own church group. She eventually went to be a missionary in Brazil. Karen’s husband increasingly isolated her from me and Beth, at least in my memory.

Mom’s unexpected death nearly 26 years ago changed things. After some initial grieving that included anger (and an especially difficult family meeting the night she died), we moved together, as we did six years ago with my father, in solidarity and familial love and support. Her death caused us to become a family again — far-flung in some ways, but closer in others. And that has continued this quarter century.

Karen also ended her marriage, and embraced a new life, which has opened her to happiness in ways she never expected more than thirty years ago.

Part of my joy in moving to Saint Louis fifteen years ago was that I would be closer to my sisters and their families. Our relationship now is of adults who know each other well, who celebrate and hold dear the family ties and inside jokes and stories, who care for each other in ways we didn’t see our parents model with their own siblings (both uncles died within the past decade). Technology and proximity allow us to be more in the lives of each other than Pop was with Uncle Jim or Mom was with Uncle Edwin. And that’s a good thing.

So, I’d say that we are now independent adults who cherish the family bonds.

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