Posted by Anna Laura on December 4, 2001, at 2:09:55
In reply to siblings, posted by sar on December 3, 2001, at 14:33:32
> i used to be somewhat puzzled that my mother very rarely communicated with her 6 brothers and sisters.
>
> recently, my sister and i have come to a conlusion to stop communicating with each other, and so have my brother and i (i am the middle child).
>
> at this age, i find it disheartening to see these breaks...yet i like myself (wow!) more than i like them; i'm just envious of all the siblings i see hanging out together...afterall, my brother is only a year younger than i am, and i wish i could get him to ome out of his shell and come hang...but my drinking and "bipolarity" scare him, he can't deal with me, and i suppose i can't deal with is square ideals and quietness, it just scares me that i can relate to neither...
>
> how is your relationship with your siblings?
The relationship with my brother and sister have grown better with time. My brother is just two years older then me: we used to be very close as children but we sort of broke up as we grew older. We grew in a troubled family (both my grandmother and my mother had violent tempers) so we managed to build up a sort of alliance between the two of us; we've been very close and confident and our relationship has been very intense until the day i left home when i was eighteen. When i came back home two years later i found out he had changed deeply : he had become hostile and obnoxius and he would tease me and hurt me all the day through. All my attempts to reconcile had been a failure.
Things got worse as he got married: her wife was jealous of the realtionship that we used to have as children, so she would keep him away from me. I think my brother never forgave me for leaving him alone with our alcholic mother. Moreover i used to beat him up when i was a child and i never forgave myself for that. I thought we could never restore that broken relationship again and as years went by i had resigned myself.
Surprisingly things grew better as he broke up from his wife; i sent him an e-mail while he was on vacation in the Uniste States with a picture of the two of us when we were children. I was pretty sure he would reject me, but i chose to follow my heart impulse no matter what. When i received his mail i realized things had changed: he probably forgave me for the things i did to him,and i was glad he made such a step forward, still i had to wait 13 years for my brother to come back to me!
My sister is just 21 years old, she is a very funny, flamboyant and cunny girl. She's studying abroad right now, attending a college in the north of Spain. I'm wishing all the best for her. Luckily she didn't have to endure all the things me and my brother went through as she grew up with another person taking care of her while our mother was at work. She didn't experience our father departure and rejection cause she wasn't born yet when he left home, nor she didn't have to endure my mother violence and abuse. When she was a small child i was in my teenage years : i would stay up late and drink , always partying and i neglected her. I had built a wall all around me in order to protect me so i wan't showing her much affection. As a woman, i was supposed to look after her, but i rejected this role; i used to think: "what the heck, i'm not her mother: i'm seventeen years old, i want to have fun, don't want any children around". My brother replaced the role my mother had forsaken and fed my sister , washed her and looked after her. As a young adult i realized me and my sister had grown distant and i felt sorry for that so i committed myself to build up a relationship with her. It took time and believe me, it was hard, but now i can say i've been her counselor and adviser when she was a little girl and i'm proud of it. Now she is a wise and happy young adult and i like to think me and my brother contributed to it.
To draw a conclusion, I must sayt that i believe the approach has to be mutual in order to build a decent relationship. In all these years i've been trying to get closer to my father with no results at all and i've come to realize it's not my fault if he is so unsensitive and uncaring; there's no way you can restore a broken relationship if both didn't manage to work hard on themselves. There is no one-way approach.
even if most times i believe i don't care about him it's stil tough to realize my father doesn't give a heck about me.
He's now remarrying for the third time with a woman two years younger then me and i found out recently she's pregnant.
Now, as i watch my siblings together i can see that some parts of me are inside of them and viceversa: it's odd, it's like we have been parents to each other somehow in all these years. I can feel there is a special empathy, a bond between us i never experienced with anyone else, though i realize i don't have much merit in it : it's been their choice to approach me once again since i've been rejecting them in one way or the other.
I don't want to sound too much sentimental or rethoric but when i think about my siblings i'm sure that if i had to leave this world tomorrow i would leave something valuable behind me and that parts of me will survive inside of them forever. My brother and sister have been the children i have never had.
poster:Anna Laura
thread:14812
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20011130/msgs/14858.html