Virginia from Color Informal posed five questions to me that were more like five themes.  One of them had me so flummoxed that I have not stopped thinking about the answer, and it has kept me awake at night.  I will tackle that one in a future post, because I have a feeling it’s going to be a doozy.  Seriously–when you finally read the question, you might not think so, but it has thrown me for a loop and made me imagine weird and scary scenarios that I never thought of before.

For now, we’ll start off with this theme set of questions from Virginia:

Without revealing names, or numbers, are there siblings you don’t communicate with? 
I actually do get along with all my siblings, but of course, that’s right now.  There was a very ugly phase a few years ago when one sibling took it upon themself to share with my parents some (we had thought) private inter-sibling emails about how to handle our parents’ future.  A lot of things were vented in the emails and this sibling decided to print them off and share them with our parents, and my mother was so incensed that she refused to speak to many of us for weeks or months.  Several of the siblings refused to get involved, and a few have essentially disowned this sibling.  “They’re dead to me” and “That [insert profanity here]” or “I will never speak to [name] again as long as I live” were among the many conversational openings in the weeks following the incident. 

When Dad got sick, much of the rancor was diminished and I basically decided life was too short and I was too tired to hold a grudge.  It was just so much work. 

Even before all this happened, there were the inevitable cliques and alliances that occur within a very large family, by age group, sisters banding together vs. brothers, the haves and the have-nots, the locals vs. the out of towners, the marrieds vs. singles…not adversarial, just little commonalities over the years that fluctuated and were replaced by other alliances and cliques. 

Like I said in yesterday’s post, this stuff is normal when you’re in a big family but totally foreign to people who are only children or who have only one or two siblings. 

Is there one you have a sense is a “twin”, separated only by age and birth order?
My younger sister immediately comes to mind.  We couldn’t look less like one another–she looks exactly like pictures of my mother and I favor my dad’s side of the family.  She’s blonde and I’m (in real life) dark haired.  But she and I were the “surprise” babies, born 11th and 12th after a five year gap after #10 had been born and our mother assumed she wouldn’t have any more children.  Mom was 39 when I was born and 41 (my current age!!!!) when Twelve was born.  So there was this crowd of kids, and then Twelve and me. 

I was two when she came along, and I spent our childhood looking out for her, so envious of her golden hair and big luminous blue eyes.  She toddled after me and when I did something wrong and Mom would say “Who DID this?” I would lean into Twelve’s ear and whisper “Say YOU did it!” and she would say “I did it.”  Mom would roll her eyes and punish both of us. 

When the older siblings started moving away from home and getting married, joining the military or going to college, Twelve and I were home with our mom a lot.  We were the built-in babysitters for nieces and nephews. Whatever I learned about puberty, life, music, people, places or things, I instantly shared with her. 

We fought like hellcats a lot of the time (kicking, screaming, pulling hair, bawling, throwing books at each other, and the memorable time when one of us chased the other out of the house with a steak knife) and would, in short order, be borrowing clothes or making radio-mix-cassette tapes together as though no fight had ever happened. 

When I got married and moved away from our hometown the summer after Twelve graduated from high school, I was so terribly depressed and missed her so badly I sank into a depression.  It was awful.  A year later, she moved to California and has been there over 20 years.  In the past 20 years, we’ve seen each other probably only ten or eleven times (for a week or so at a time) and it’s nowhere near enough.  We talk on the phone a lot, email each other, send pictures.  Our children are four months apart in age, which is funny because they’re younger than many of my parents’ great-grandchildren.

Do each of you have a label – pretty, smart, athletic etc?
Depends on whom you’re asking to apply the labels.  My husband says we’re all variations on the same theme.  It’s fun for us when we’re together, but exhausting for bystanders and in-laws. 

There are several artists, several who write, several who sing, three drummers, a couple of “holy rollers” (which I believe includes me, if you’re using the family’s standard of someone who isn’t ashamed to pray out loud).  If you ask the family who is the writer, who is the geek, who is the drama queen, who is Mom’s favorite, who is spoiled, who is the black sheep, who is the partier, etc…you might have some answers in common, but it’s all perception. 

Virginia, thanks for the thought-provoking questions.  And that’s just the first set! And stay tuned, y’all, for the eventual post that explores the answer to her question about how my life and personality would have turned out if I had been an only child.  That question haunts me.