My sister Anna was married on Saturday, so we spent the past week in Cincinnati doing this and that to get everything in readiness for the big day. It was a busy, exhausting time, and many good things happened, but what stands out to me was the happiness of having all my siblings in the same place, and not just siblings, but their spouses and my brother's fiancee and all the grandchildren too. I played with my pretty nieces all week, and got to hold my new nephew Benj, with his perfect round head and big ears and his manly fuss. It is a constant joy to me to see my brother as a father now, or my sister as a mother, or my siblings as aunts and uncles to each individual grandbaby.
Just as wonderful is interacting with my brothers and sisters as adults, each with our own separate experience, and yet with such a strong core of mutual family life that we instinctively speak the same language. I've often wondered if children in broken family situations end up clinging to each other more firmly because they form the unshakeable heart of the family, whereas intact families have a stronger parental center and less cohesive sibling groups. There may be no marrying and giving in marriage in heaven, but after death I'll still be the sister of John, Will, Liz, Anna, and Nathanael, and being together with all of them now is like a little foretaste of eternal bliss.
7 comments:
"I've often wondered if children in broken family situations end up clinging to each other more firmly because they form the unshakeable heart of the family"
Definitely not always.
My mom and her sisters are certainly very close. Their mother was away from home for two different periods because of TB, and then died relatively young. So they really depended on each other, I guess.
I'd say not always too. My mom and her sister are super close, but my mom has nothing to do with one brother and hardly any interaction with the other. Both have huge issues though from their upbringing and life choices, which I think is a lot of it. I'm not close to my siblings either, even my only full blood sister. But before my conversion, we were extremely close. We have only drifted further and further apart in the subsequent ten years. I wonder if the closeness depends a lot on how similar the general life paths are, and how deep the wounds go from the troubled family life...
I think it is wonderful that you have that closeness with your siblings. I am a little jealous!
" I wonder if the closeness depends a lot on how similar the general life paths are, and how deep the wounds go from the troubled family life..."
Uh-huh -- and it's not all that uncommon for warring parents to pit siblings against each other.
Yeah, it may happen in some families, but I'm not one to extract silver linings from the whole broken-home thing. Too many people go *mining* for that silver.
I think it has to do with the attitude of the parents towards their children whether or not the parents are married or divorced. If the parents encourage the siblings to love and root for each other, the children will generally be close. If the parents play favorites and make comparisons, the children generally will not be close.
I think Jenny's right that it has to do with how the parents parent - though there are so many factors. My parents have a strong marriage and we had a fairly strong sense of family identity, but I think the reason we're close is because 1)My parents stressed to us the importance siblings play in adult life and 2)otherwise, they left us alone to have our own relationships with one another, without interference or micromanaging conflicts.
The whole 'no tattling' ethos, which sometimes seems odd in otherwise law-and-order families, really comes from this feeling that siblings should be allies, I think.
(Context: I have 6 siblings, all of whose company I truly enjoy. We're a bunch of oddballs, but we speak the same language, so to speak.)
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