My brother and I had a pretty stormy relationship when we were young; we were alternately bitterest enemies and best friends. Now, we are next-door neighbours, and have a gate between our back-yards (so my kids can use the huge climber he built at the back of his yard, and he and his family can get easy access to our pool). He sees our sister more often than I do (even though I was closer to her when we were younger), but I still manage to see her once a month or so.
My family has always been emotional, in both the best and worst ways.
Thank you very much (also Lsura) I feel like I’ve had a little therapy. As I understand it, if even one of your (completely) brown haired ancestors over the last 3 million years had a baby with a blond haired partner then genes for blond hair remain in the bloodline and could pop out at any time. In my family’s case, though, all the recessive colorings seemed to have jumped out at once. My brother has very pretty auburn hair, my sister raven coloured hair and I just squeak.
I can’t help thinking, though, that a child born with an appearance foreign to the father’s would not have made it out of the cradle in ages past. According to my teach yourself sociobiology books it’s of such crucial importance for fathers to be sure of paternity that a lot of human behaviour is geared towards ensuring that will be the case.
I’m 25, and my brother is 17. I realize that he is not quite an adult but in the past three years, since I moved out, our relationship has vastly improved. As kids we did a lot of semi-serious bickering and a fair number of screaming fights, but it almost never escalated to the physical. And to think that my mother thought with our age gap, we wouldn’t fight. Ha! WRONG!
But I think the combination of our both doing some growing up – his hitting late adolescence, mine just exiting adolescence altogether and trying to figure out this RL thing – and not living in the same house, has helped things tremendously. We get along fabulously now. I probably call him about once a week, and if he ever remembers to turn on ICQ we chat that way frequently. I think we’re going to remain good friends from here on out.
One of these days I’m going to have to embarass the bejesus out of him by telling him just how much I love him and care for him and wish I lived closer to them so that I could see him more often. Hey, he’s my BROTHER. I met him when he was eight hours old. Anybody messes with him is going to have my foot up their ass because NOBODY messes with my brother! He’d do the same for me, too, I’m sure of it. I know he likes me more than he’s willing to admit.
My mom is the oldest of six. She and her siblings are very close. Always have been. My mom moved away after she & my dad got married, but not so far that we couldn’t visit. And we did. Every weekend. It was fun.
I and my younger brother are close, but we don’t see each other as often as I’d like, mostly due to our work schedules. We used to hate each other when we were growing up. Oh man, we fought. But as we got older, the fighting kinda cooled off, my brother got his s*** together (he had a lot of problems as a teenager), and now he’s a great guy. He’s got a college degree, a great job, an awesome wife, and a beautiful son. And he and my husband are in competition to see who can be the Evillest Uncle.
My mom has 5 brothers and sisters, and they have the most hellish relationship of any family I’ve ever seen. Ever since my grandfather died about 10 years ago, they’ve fought over who has to take care of my grandmother. My mom chose to move away so she could better her life, and she’s been the outcast ever since. My uncles won’t talk to her. Her oldest sister still sees her once every couple of years, and they email frequently, but her younger sister is just as bad as my uncles. My mom asked to borrow somem oney, so she could put a down payment on a house, and my aunt shuned her…she has more money than she’ll ever know what to do with. Of course, my mom also asked her mother, and she also said no…the lady’s 90 something years old, with expenses of maybe $100 a month including everything…she has over 80 grand in her bank account, still collecting on my grandfather’s military funds. It’s sick, really.
My sister and I are best friends. She’s 17, and I’m 19, and we do everything together. Growing up we bickered constantly, and drove each other nuts, but about the time we moved up here, we realized we had no one else to hang out with. We look nothing alike, but we share the same brain. It’s funny, because we both work at the same place, and new people will never realize we’re sisters. Last week, she was talking to Jason about how my mom was out of town, and he asked who she was staying with. I said she was staying with me, and he gave me this weird look like ‘Why’s the girl staying with her manager?’, and I was like “You do know we’re sisters, right?”…He completely didn’t believe us. We had to pull out our drivers licenses to prove it. I’d be lost if I didn’t have her around though…
Funny you should bring this up. I’ve often wondered what my parents did. I’m sure there’s tons of factors, but one seems to be treating your kids equally (or at least not showing favoritism openly), and thereby sidestepping sibling rivalry somewhat.
I think it also helps if your parents are immigrants with thick accents in a neighborhood of rampant WASPism. This tends to draw siblings together, as you try to protect yourself from being considered complete freaks. I recognize that this is, however, not an option available to everyone. Other challenges could work, of course.
Any other suggestions would interest me, as I hope to have kids someday.
Again, let me just ask - if you got along well with your siblings growing up, or you get along with them now, what did your parents do? Or, if your kids get along now, what did you do?
To be perfectly honest, I didn’t really like 'em much then, and over the years things haven’t changed that much. I’m 42, 1 older brother(money grubbing pompous ass), a younger sister(fundie!) and a younger brother(he’s ok, I like him). We see each other on holidays (any other time there is a get together I hear about after the fact from my mom). I was practically invisible as a child, never gave anyone any trouble blah blah blah, so was ignored. Of course all that changed when at 17 I moved across the state to live in sin with an older man. This shocked them all so much they still don’t know what to say to me. It does seem rather sad to think when my parents are gone, I will most likely never see or hear about the siblings again. If I didn’t look so much like the rest of them, I would swear I was adopted, or beamed down from the mothership, and everyone knows but me. My Mom is an only, but talks to her wide array of uncles, aunts and cousins religously, as does my Dad - who is the eldest of three.
My father’s only brother is 11 years older. They’ve never been close because of the age disparity (as well as proximity).
My mother is one of the middle children out of 7 kids. Most of them stayed in the same relative geographic area. They have held an annual reunion for many years now.
I’m the 4th of 5 children, ranging in age from 48 to 37. We’re pretty scattered, too. Three of us live in the Metro NY area (close to our parents), but the other two live in Indiana and Hawaii. Hard to get together when you’re half a world away. But my sister happens to be visiting from Hawaii this summer and my brother and his wife came in from Indiana for a wedding. So we all had a big weekend reunion at my parents’ house. Lots of fun.
Holidays most of us can manage to get together some way. So we do remain close. And communication, especially e-communication, helps a lot too.
How do we get along? Well, even though we have differing lifestyles and political views, we’re very loving and define each other by the fact that we are family, not by whatever labels may be attached. I don’t think we judge each other. And our collective sense of humor makes us all laugh at the same things, so a reunion is a riotous mix of fast-and-furious ad libs and one-liners, with much hilarity and laughter. Yep, we like each other well enough.
