MTA (was rushed this morning): I’ll cherish the first moment I (4 1/2 years old) laid eyes on my sister. We’re both adopted, so my parents announced to me one morning that we would be going to get a new baby (from the adoption agency). We went home in a cab, and my mom gave her to me to hold, and I still remember looking down at her and her smiling back, and getting all sorts of warm mushies as a result. I wasn’t jealous in the least, and in fact helped potty train her. Our subsequent squabbles were pretty mild compared to some of the abuse described above, driven more by petty in-the-moment selfishness than anything else.
John DiFool, that’s so sweet!
I’m the youngest of six, grouped into two mini-families of three. The older three were teenagers and older by the time I came along. The younger three (I and two sisters) were ornery to one another. The middle sister and I would gang up on the older one (I remember us gluing her favorite doll’s eyes shut with Mucilage), and the older two ganged up on me. The worst was the year I got a big, beautiful doll for Christmas. Mom had made the doll a dress that matched my Christmas dress. All day long, my sisters addressed the doll by my name and ignored me. I was so mad I couldn’t see straight!
Interestingly, my oldest sister and I never ganged up on our middle sister.
I am now extremely close to my two sisters. And now that two of my siblings have passed on, the remaining four of us are closer than ever as a whole, too.
My brother and I were like cats and dogs and I was a horrible little bully to him most of the time, without really knowing why I was doing it. (He forgave me about four years ago.) However, when we were both furious against our dad, we would form this tense kind of solidarity.
My older half-siblings where so much older than I (over 10 years), that they never really fought or argued with me as a child. How could they? I was the baby! Heh, instead, they would fight with each other sometimes in things that involved me. But the downside was that it took them a longer time to realize I was not a small kid and could understand “adult conversations”.
Now that we’re all grown ups (supposedly), we all get along fine.
They’re only about a year and a half apart each other, though, so they DID fight and bickered when they were kids. Still, they loved each other and stood up for each other. And although they still bicker and argue, they still love each other too.
My brothers & I were anarchic.
Lots of fun, lots of fights.
Good times & helping each other; then again, I knocked out one of Tommy’s teeth.
I had to show my 17-years-older sister the same respect and deference that I would any adult.
She was allowed to tease, harangue, belittle and so forth, as any older sister does to a younger.
My older sister and I bickered a little until she got into High School. Afterwards, I acted as something of a mediator between her and our parents. We get along very well today; she’s 30.
There are three of us, so it would almost always turn into 2 against 1. There was no real pattern as to who would be the 1, that I can recall.
Everything’s peachy these days, although if we had once more to share the back seat of a non air-conditioned car for eight hours, we might revert to our old ways. 
Sis and I hated each other and did nothing but bicker when we were kids. I still think she had the upper hand in the fighting department - she’s 3 years older than me, but more importantly I was always afraid of really hurting her (and getting into trouble for it), and she knew it.
Things eased down a bit when both of us reached teenager/young adulthood. Things REALLY eased down when she moved to college and we only saw each other on the WEs & holidays.
These days, she lives out in the sticks so we don’t see each other much, and we don’t understand each other/think the same way at all, but we’re cool. We’re on friendly terms, respect each other for the most part, I’d trust her with my life (but NOT my money - she’d find a way to keep it 
) etc… I like her husband, too. I was genuinely happy at their wedding, even though she’d have to waterboard me to make me tell her so ;).
We never fought that much, but we were never that close either. It’s like we weren’t involved enough with each other’s lives to bother fighting. Which is odd because we are less than 2 years apart.
We still aren’t very close. We don’t hate each other or anything. But I can go for months without talking to her and not miss it.
There was a huge age difference between my brother and me. He was ten years older, my sister was 12 years older and my eldest brother was 16 years older.
So there was no real friendship. There was few physical fights because they were so much bigger than me.
My brother who was ten years older used to tease me, he seemed to enjoy it. He’d always call me a baby. “Oh you have baby toys” or “Those are baby games.” And at the times I was so mad, but looking back it must’ve been hard for him to have to share a room with someone ten years younger.
He was 15 listening to the Beatles and the Who and I was watching “Romper Room.”
My mum died when I was 16 and we had a huge falling out right after the funeral and I haven’t seen brother and sister since and that was 1980.
I have 3 sisters, no brothers and I’m pretty much in the middle (ones 3 years older and the two younger are Irish twins 3+4 years younger). There were a lot of fights, but most of the sibling camaraderie took place among themselves. So, it’s not as if we were at each others throats all the time, but I never got to be as close to them as they are with each other.
I have two younger bothers. We were all very close in age (a year between each of us), and we fought like cats in a bag, but we were also very bonded and close.
My brother is almost exactly 2 years older (1 year and 355 days). I always followed him around and did whatever he wanted to do. Neither of us are fighting types and I honestly don’t remember any fighting between us.
I pretty much grew up playing with his toys, and then listening to his music. Somehow we did manage to have different lives and personalities, but at the core we’re in sync.
We’re both over 30 now and still as thick as thieves.
I only have one sister. She’s about four and a half years younger than I am. We often fought like cats and dogs, probably more often than we got along. But on important things, we stuck together. Today she’s probably my closest female friend. We’re still different as night and day in many things, but it’s surprising how much more we are alike than different.
I had a twin brother. (Well, I still do!) People would assume we were close because of the twin thing but we never were. There was a lot of bickering and fighting and we were always jealous of the attention the other was getting from anyone. My parents tried to be “fair” when we were younger but by my teenage hood it became very clear that the family lines were drawn so that my mother always sided with my brother, and my father always sided with my mother. This was actually discussed openly and basically my only choice was to suck it up or withdraw from the family dynamics. I did a little of both.
Now we are both in our 40’s and he lives in rural England and I live in Japan. The only contact we have is through our parents. He married late and in haste to a woman who is bipolar. The marriage lasted five years and produced two delightful and very damaged little girls.
My brother is fiercely protective of them to the point that he’s a bit mad himself. We made the mistake of going back to England for Christmas last year, and he came to my parents house with his girls. They themselves are lovely but between him literally not allowing us to touch or interact with them much, and my mother defending him and making things worse, it was an extremely tense and rather miserable four days.
This year they went to stay but we were in Japan. We arranged to Skype them but he wandered into the room, waved at the camera and wandered out again. I don’t think even ten words were exchanged.
I don’t know him, and he doesn’t know me. It’s really sad.
Some fighting, some friendship, but mostly casual indifference. i had my life & interests and she had hers, and very little aside from our dinner table intersected in any way.
I have an brother, 18 months older, and two sisters, one 5 years younger and one 10 years younger. My brother and I spent most of the time being buddies, with the occasional full-on fight over who-knows-what. Our last fight was when I was 9 and he 11, and I got a lucky punch in that dropped him. With my older younger sister, she was close enough in age to want to tag along on things that we didn’t want to be saddled with the responsibility of looking out for her, so there were squabbles about that. My baby sister was so much younger that there weren’t issues to fight about. Except. For a while, when I was in high school, she would come in my room and mess with my stuff. I was painting in oils, and she had poked my palette knife in every tube of paint. Another time I had a plastic model car nearing completion and she came in and “painted” it all over with thinner. There weren’t fights in this case, merely scoldings from me that had no effect. (And, forty-five years later, I still don’t know why my mom refused to let me lock my door when I left for schooL)
We all got along well by the time we two older brothers were in college.
My brother is 3 years older, and was very much a bully as a kid. After we both left home, we each communicated with our parents, but not at all with each other for 25 years . . . until our father’s funeral. Now that both of our parents are gone we have to stay in touch by e-mail for legal/financial reasons, but that’s about it. But I have to admit, we do get along somewhat better than we used to.
I’m several years older than my brothers; in many ways I was more of a parent than a sibling, when we were little. The youngest (8years’ difference) told me he was finally seeing me as a sibling, someone on his level and not “one of the grown ups,” when he was 17 and had recently discovered that my old records were actually quite cool. Both of them have been known to call me “Mom” distractedly - this drives Mom up a wall, but as Middlebro (6 years’ difference) put it, “well, she’s the one who’d give me clean pajamas and drive the monsters away whenever I had nightmares.”
They were always good friends. They’d argue, but in the way of friends arguing; it would mostly be discussions on how to set up the game, or those escalating things men do, “I’ll hit you!” “I’ll shoot you!” “I’ll shoot you with a tank’s cannon!” “I’ll shoot at you a missile from my submarine!” “Oh yeah? Well, I’ll throw an A-BOMB at you!” “Jooooooo! :(”. Yelling and hitting fell under the heading of “mataros pero no os peguéis”, “you’re allowed to kill each other but not to hit each other.” Just no.
Middlebro is married; for a while, his wife would be jealous that when both bros team up in any game other than Trivial Pursuit, the rest of us are doomed, doomed I tell you. She and her husband need several attempts to guess each other’s drawings at Pictionary; the Bros guess each other’s doodles on the first line, and I can assure you Li’lbro can’t draw to save his life. Apparently 16 years of playing together and sleeping in the same room make you telepathic to each other…