Last week, I stumbled through the door of my home in London after a whirlwind four nights in Dubai for my sister’s 40th birthday. It was a full-on weekend: 20 female friends and family (and one male best friend) who partied hard, took endless content for the Gram, ate way too much good food and belly-laughed so much that my stomach muscles got the best workout in quite some time. My voice was hoarse for pretty much the entire trip.
At one point, I remember glancing over at my sister as we were all squashed into a hot tub at a hotel rooftop pool party, singing and screaming while the DJ played the remix of Moliy and Silent Addy’s “Shake it to the Max” and just thinking: “That girl brings the best (and worst!) out of me.”
It reminded me of how lucky I am that my parents decided to carry on having kids, despite giving birth to perfection the first time (I jest, sort of).
I’ve got my sister Carina, ever the middle child, wilder than her sensible sister, lover of people, annoying and amazing at the same time. And then my brother Joshua, the youngest and by far the most responsible out of the three of us, a bit quieter due to the dominant sisters in his life, with a brilliant mind and the most loving, sensitive soul.
square CHARLENE WHITE My sister has moved abroad. Why am I grieving?
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People often talk about the impact their parents have on their lives growing up, but I think we underestimate how much of an impact our siblings have on who we grow up to be, and what type of person we choose to become.
The three of us definitely fit into traditional sibling dynamics of responsible eldest, the one with middle-child syndrome, and the youngest raised with fewer rules because my parents were tired by then.
But as I’ve gotten older, I realise that it’s about more than that. Our siblings tend to be the first children we spend huge amounts of our lives with, so those relationships can impact how we navigate the world and how we see ourselves.
I was recently reading parts of Susan Dominus’s book, The Family Dynamic: A Journey into the Mystery of Sibling Success, which argues: “Siblings, at their best, can urge one another on. Competing and collaborating, whether intentionally or not, they help chart the course of one another’s lives.”
I see this playing out daily with my own children. There are just two years between them, so they are far closer in age than me and my siblings – in many ways it’s new territory for me. There are five years between me and my sister, and 13 between me and my brother, so my relationship with each of them was slightly different. Yet the fundamental parts of who we became later on in life still very much hinged on our relationships growing up.
Irrespective of what time I rolled back into the family home on a Saturday night, I would still drag myself out of bed to be present at my brother’s rugby matches and tournaments, screaming words of encouragement from the sidelines while sobering up with a bacon sandwich. He, all these years later, is passionate about always showing up for his friends, and niece and nephew.
As she wasn’t the eldest, my sister didn’t have the same level of responsibility I did when it came to navigating life with a sick parent. She was able to live her life very differently from me, because she didn’t have the same burdens to carry. What I took on meant that she was free to make different choices.
The jealousy I probably felt as a kid watching her freedom turned into respect, and taught me so much, including learning to relax into life a little bit. But even before then, we were two young girls living under one roof – there was a lot of yelling and arguing, lots of unauthorised stealing of clothes, a ton of eye-rolling, but a lot of love.
We were each other’s first best friend, we just didn’t know it then. We also learned that friendship is hard, but worth the work. A skill that blends into so many other parts of our lives.
So when I see my two kids bickering over something or another and winding each other up, I see them developing negotiating skills, learning to respect each other, finding their feet with their first best friend, and figuring out the sibling roles that will determine who they’ll become.
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