Family Ties...

I have a complicated relationship with my siblings. That's the sort of thing people say outloud. It's complicated.

Basically we don't really like each other. We have nothing in common. If we met as strangers we wouldn't click. Which is so weird considering we are siblings. But here we are.

My oldest brother is 14 years older than I am. He got married at 19. So our relationship has always been more distant than with my other siblings. We just don't have the time together to have a tight sibling bond. He was always more like an uncle than a brother. And we aged very differently. He condensed into more and more of a conservative and I...well you know.

My middle brother and I were the closest most of the time. He's brilliant. Literally works on satellites and space stuff. He also never left home to live on his own. He went to work helping support the family with he was young and never stopped supporting it. The house my folks lived in for the last 30 years of their lives or so is his house technically. He bought it and they all lived there. Now my sister and one of her sons still do. But we still don't have a lot of contact. We exchange birthday messages twice a year. No ill will, just not a lot of things to talk about.

My sister and I were the most complicated. There was one stretch for a few years in my teens where we were actually close. Did things together. Went to dinner, went to the movies. There was actually a pocket in there where all of us went to dinner together once a week. Looking back I think it was to give my parent's a date night, but John, Ann, Jeff, Susan and I would go to dinner. It was maybe a six month period, but it was the most sibling interaction we all had that didn't end in someone storming off.

But anyway, Susan was the only girl in the family for seven years. I mentioned yesterday that our two older sisters died shortly after birth. Susan was the sole survivor. Only girl in the family, only granddaughter on both sides. She was the princess. And full on princess. They didn't cut her hair, she had all the cute dresses. She was IT. For seven years. Until I was born.

So we were not set up to be friends.

The first thing that happened was the family cat did not respond well to me, so Suzi went to live somewhere else. Susan lost her namesake cat. As she told my mother it wasn't right, the cat was there first. Which, fair. There was also the case of the Mrs. Beasley doll. My sister's appendix burst when she was like 8, I want to say. My parents bought her a Mrs. Beasley doll to take to her in the hospital. But I latched on to that thing and was NOT letting her go. And I didn't. They got her something else, I'm sure, but can you imagine? You just had major surgery, could have died sort of surgery, and your baby sister, that you didn't want in the first place, takes the doll your parents got you? And they let her? And I drug that doll around for years. I, of course, had no memory of snatching it away, I was only a toddler, but it was part of the family lore.

I've also talked about Susan's troubled years. She had addiction issues. We had to move across town her freshman year in high school because Highland was the only school willing to take her after she spent her first semester at Eldorado skipping every single class and getting in fights and getting caught with drugs. She was also tasked with taking care of me those years. Which wasn't fair to her.

She was an early teen having to take care of her much younger sister. I know looking back how unfair that was. I know that it was a bad call from my parents, especially when they knew she was struggling with her own demons, but at the time all I knew was that she was a terror in my life and I had to take it.

This is the aside that I give...when you meet someone who thinks kids should be spanked and they say, "I was spanked and I grew up fine" I say, "No, you grew up to be someone who thinks it's okay for adults to hit kids." Because we were a corporal punishment house the first time I told my parents that Susan had hit me she framed it as a punishment for me misbehaving and as she was the one in charge...well that was also the last time I told them because there was no point. And part of me just understood I had to not get in trouble so she wouldn't have a reason to hit me. I did not yet grow up fine. I was still in the "it's okay for people who are bigger to hit people who are smaller if they don't do what you want"

I will end the aside there but I could, and might still, write a lot more about how corporal punishment breaks your brain.

But anyway...it was a rough few years. She was abusive physically and mentally. It was hard. The damage was extensive and long lasting. And then she got clean. And we were all supposed to forget about it. It was in the past. What I needed was therapy not a carpet to sweep it under, but that's not what happened. It took years for me to really grasp why I was so angry at the world and years beyond that to stop. Though, like the Hulk, my secret is I'm always angry. There is always going to be a deep well of bile I can tap into at any point in time.

But our relationship moved on. We had a few years after the abuse, before her first marriage, where we got along. We hung out. We started to forge bonds. Then she started dating and eventually married the absolute worst person I had ever met up to that point. And that was that. We never recovered. I felt badly for her, I tried to understand why she stayed, clinically I can tell you all about the reasons, but emotionally I just cut that line and walked away. No more for me, thanks.

And then Brent and I married and moved and we continued to grow up and I ended up being solidly the black sheep. I don't have the same politics, I don't have the same religious beliefs, I still remember what it was like in the house when Susan was using and everyone else seems to have forgotten. I have no connection there anymore.

There is a part of me that is sad about it. I miss what could have been. When I see people who are close with their siblings, who still do things together as adults, I know that I am missing that. I grew up with holidays with the whole shebang. I grew up with all of us getting together for birthdays and just dinner out. I thought it would always be like that. Because Mom really wanted it to be like that. She and her oldest sister did not get along and she only got close to her middle sister later in life. Dad didn't really have much of a relationship with any of his siblings. We saw his brothers every once in a while. Heard from one of his sisters rarely. The other sister we never even met. My mother didn't want that for us, she wanted all of her kids to be tight.

And the three of them plus Ann, my brother's wife (who has been part of the family for almost as long as I have so in law seems too distancing) were for the most part. John and Ann have moved to Florida to be near Ashley and her family, but before that they still all did holidays and birthdays and church events. It was just me that was on the outside. And though I miss the idea of all of us being close I know the reality is that it's not possible. Facebook really showed how not possible that was.

I'm not like them. They aren't like me. We shared Mom and Dad and once they were gone there wasn't anything left.

We say it's complicated in situations like that because to say, "we just don't care to spend time together" sounds colder. But it's closer to the truth. We don't have anything in common except the name. Not at this point. And I changed mine almost 40 years ago so...

I think about the three siblings I have that I never met and I realize that the only bond I had to them was one my mother made. The three living siblings (four if you count Ann and I do) and I have about the same sort of bond. We have our own memories but really it was my mother holding us all together. She was the center of our family and without her gravitational pull we have spun off in our own directions.

And that's okay. It really is. If you have one of those complicated relationships with your siblings, that's okay. If you don't, if you are tight with them, that's great too. Family is what you make it. And I've made mine here in Oregon, and honestly all over the world with my extended clan. I love my siblings, but I don't really have anything else in common with them.

When you think about it, it's not actually all that complicated after all.