I learn so much from my friends, and that is not an accident. I pick and choose people by who fascinates me. Who makes me laugh? Who kills me at Scrabble? Who shows me a way to look at things I don't achieve on my own? Who has a skill set I can't even imagine? Who flies a plane, makes cheese from scratch, can take my computer apart and put it back together, who knows art history or poli sci? Who can play the guitar with such shocking perfection that it makes me feel feelings I can't describe? Who makes me laugh until my sides hurt even when I'm in super serious Depressio mode?
Now that I'm at a certain age, it's rare to find many of my friends who don't have children and families that they are busily building on their own (I actually can count on one hand those people and for many of them it is by choice). I actually recently realized that somewhere in the last two years, I crossed an invisible line. When I was 32 and dating I encountered a few people who had been married or had kids. Now, it's everyone. This, more than all the weddings and baby showers I've bought gifts for are the sure sign that building new families is the business of being 30 something.
Of course, this means considering the families we all came from, or at least it does for all of my friends as they try to enter into this with their eyes open. I've been thinking a lot about this for the last month, for a lot of different reasons. And then I came across this TED talk. Let's all acknowledge that TED talks are pretty cool. Not all of them are my personal cup of tea, but they are all well done and thought provoking. I typically watch about 2 or 3 of them a week because it reminds me of the lunch series my grad department used to have a couple of times a month, or better yet, the "donuts and discussion" group the grad students did. Smart, smart people sharing their well detailed outlook, and yet not hours and hours long. Just enough to give you a taste and make you want to learn more.
I urge you all to listen to this talk as it may persuade you to think beyond the surface of your family. But, I'll say a few things about this talk by Jeffrey Kluger to set up some of my thoughts. He speaks powerfully for the fact that siblings color our lives profoundly, and that this relationship can be significantly defining in positive or negative directions.
"There may be no relationship that affects us more profoundly; that's closer, finer, harder, sweeter, happier, sadder, more filled with joy or fraught with woe than the relationship we have with our brothers and sister. there's power in the sibling bond," he says.
I have lived this. My happiest memories as a child revolve around hilarious or close moments with my brothers (please to note: I am not leaving out my sister here as a cut on her. We didn't grow up in the same house so my bond with her comes from a different place than playing Legos or dress up). I have significantly sentimental memories of long car trips, catching sand crabs, of building forts, of jumping on the beds in a vacation cottage by the beach, and, for some reason, of watching Star Trek with them one summer and realizing that as the oldest, it was my job to read the subtitles for them.
But some of my worst childhood memories are of brutal and vicious fights, of cruel things we did to one another, of being locked out of their room or locking one of them out of mine, of putting a CD in the microwave, of being pushed into a tree, concussions, or having toys sadistically dismembered. I'm sure I deserved this as much as every big sister, and more than many.
What stands to reason is that since my brothers were and are (and my sister now also joins in this) my peers in the family, they and I have an advantage of sharing each others' stories in a way our parents never can or could. We lived the same life, in the same house, growing up with much the same lot in life (though my youngest sibling and I not too long ago realized that in some ways we grew up in different families with different parents because the foundation of all of those relationships changed so radically when my parents divorced . . . which happened just as I left for college.)
I'm not surprised that Kluger says,"The sibling bond can be a thing of abiding love. Our parents leave us too early, our spouse and our children come along too late - our siblings are the only ones who are with us for the entire ride. Over the arc of decades there may be nothing that defines us and forms us more powerfully than our relationship with our brothers and sisters."
I've written poems about this. It's possibly one of the most difficult connections I try to maintain and understand, but when it works, it is . . . well, it makes me feel my rough edges smooth out in a way that happens maybe nowhere else in my life.
I once wrote this piece of . . . something:
I miss them as often as I forget them,
When we are apart, I have to make whole cloth
Without them.
I discount them as often as I believe we
Three were once
Mistaken for triplets, sharing
Toys and triumphs as easily as we doled out
Fists or french fries.
The memories don’t blur, but the
Bright sharpness of elbows pressing against me reminds
Me suddenly of things I have shelved
and rarely dusted off.
(It is what it is as a piece of a poem I once wrote, good, bad, or blahhh, but it is also very, very true)
I believe in siblings. I believe they see me as no one else does, and so maybe I not only get to see them in that special light, but also borrow it and see myself differently through them. I also believe in siblings because as adults we've been able to come together to share some bigger than big things. Happy things that would have been less fun without them, sad things that would have been miserable or impossible without them. What would I have done if I couldn't turn to my sister and my brother when it came time to take care of a dying parent? What would happen if I stood alone in my family?
None of this, of course, is to say that our relationships are idyllic, or even as well knit as I sometimes wish they were. We've all had long moments of ignoring the others. When it has been my turn to do that I've sloshed back and forth between guilt and defiance. When I'm "in" and someone else is "out" I feel angry and hurt by their actions. So, the accidental bumps and bruises of riding in the back seat of the station wagon aren't that different from Kluger's assertion that our siblings are along for the ride, even as adults. I've been there for my siblings when I could and when I realized it was important, and whether that was showing up at wrestling matches, one strange afternoon spent sunbathing on the back deck with Chad hours before he graduated high school, or picking up my nephew from the airport, that's what it means. And they've been there for me. My sister brought her sister here and took me into the mountains. I will never forget that my brother Geoff drove up to my college graduation on the same Saturday as his prom, knowing he would have to immediately leave and drive 2 hours back to put his tux on.
But it's not all sunning ourselves and sand crabs, right? There's birth order, favoritism, and what Kluger calls de-identification to consider, and all of those played important roles in our house . . . though maybe not in exactly the expected ways in all cases. Here's the idea - evolution for most animals is to raise one or a very few babies at a time. Some mothers will do this by booting a smaller egg out of the nest (Crested Penguins), or letting hatchlings literally tear each other apart (Black Eagles). Humans aren't so different when we're competing for attention and resources by trying to discover our strongest selling points and hitting on them early, and often. Siblings have to de-identify with one another because if one is a talented artist, the next can pursue art for less than half of the attention the first artist in the family got. We have to differentiate to be worthy and to garner all of the attention in one area, is the idea. "Someone's the funny one, someone's the pretty one, someone's the smart one, someone's the athlete."
Pause. Beat. Pause.
I don't know about all of your families, but this was actually literally spoken out loud in mine. In a hospital room, about 10 days before my dad died. "Chad's the charmer athlete, and Geoff is the funny one. Camille is my southern belle. And Christie? She's the smart one." All of this is ironic and scientifically fascinating all at once. First, I will note some things carefully. None of us is only that one thing that was named. My brother the charmer is also he of a genius IQ, a Midas touch for seemingly almost any pursuit be it gourmet food, music, or writing, and he is and has ever been a gifted athlete. My brother the comedian is actually phenomenally smart and possessed of a singular perspective and a voice to tell it, despite not being interested always in academics. He has amazing determination and resolve, and this combined with his natural gifts have turned him into a fierce and accomplished mixed martial arts fighter. My sister the southern belle is an undeniable beauty, imbued with both the genteel southern coating, and the steel rod for a spine underneath. She is funny, warm, loving, forgiving, smart, spontaneous, sophisticated, scientific, and has a gift for feeling people out. It's not surprising that she is a truly talented nurse.
Now, it's interesting that Chad pinned so much of himself in athletics, because, well, I couldn't. Asthma, bad knees, and lets face it, I'm just not that swift or graceful aside from all those things! Meanwhile, Chad has so many gifts, he could've claimed "smart one." Actually, all my life what I heard was, "Chad and Geoff are gifted, despite some of their learning differences. But Christie . . . well she's such a hard worker." Which isn't exactly the same as being the "smart one," is it? (You could've knocked me over with a feather in that 2008 hospital room when that was said out loud) Meanwhile, in this tangled web of what I couldn't be (umm, I sucked at soccer, and I couldn't please by playing football, cello. It remains a crappy sports gender inequality) if working hard was my most pleasing trait, you bet your boots I was going to market the heck out of it. I wonder which came first - Chad being charming and athletic because I was pursuing an academic life at an early age, or me giving up on sports because it was never going to catch the eyes and therefore claiming school since it was what was left?
Whereas our youngest sibling being the "funny one" . . . well, to be clear, he is. His tongue is sometimes barbed, but never unamusing. And this bears out exactly with expected birth order. The youngest or smallest has to develop "lower power strategy" (what a terrible phrase for that. It sounds like "Developing nation." So condescending). The idea here is that the littlest one has to make people laugh so they don't lock him in a closet (though I regret to admit, we did this so often that Geoff thought it was a game and used to bring the rope to us!) or belt him. If s/he can charm and disarm and work their way into the hearts of people, they'll be better provided for than if they fight for what they need and lose an unfair battle. So, it isn't surprising that Geoff is, truly, the funny one. What's remarkable is that he is so much more than that, and does fight so hard for what he wants . . . and wins!
This is perhaps one of a large cascade of things about my family that breaks the mold. I won't go into all of it here, but suffice it to say that there are good and hard things about the ways in which birth order was true in our upbringing, and good and hard things about the ways in which it was not true. I can't speak for everyone else, you understand, just for me.
The next fact was really, stop-me-in-my-tracks, stunning. Favoritism isn't just a joke that we've had in my family for years. It's not just my mom buying each of us a t-shirt one Christmas saying "Mom's favorite." It's real and has been investigated. There is evidence suggesting that 70% of fathers and 65% of mothers exhibit a preference for one child over another or others, and that often it's a different child for each of those parents. Some of this is influenced, perhaps, by birth order and gender, but some of it may be better predicted by what that parents values are. Well, I won't say anything about who is who's favorite in my story, but I will say that in a family of two parents, and three children, that means that someone is necessarily and mathematically left out at all times. I don't know that it was me; what I do know is that it's interesting that I wasn't making it up when I was heard to say recently, "There's not enough to go around in a family of three children. Two sounds good to me."
But if the question isn't who does this, just who does this in observable ways, then I wonder . . . is this an argument for only-children? I know that Kluger wants us all to see our siblings as the people who helped us learn to develop relationships in ways that impact us over and over in our lives. And I'm not sorry for mine. Hey, I wish my jewelry box didn't get chucked into the heater, making it impossible to retrieve my earrings. But I'm sure my brothers wish I hadn't been such an insufferable know-it-all. I'm not sorry I have them, or the addition of my sister. My therapist put it this way when we discussed my family for other reasons, "If you could change it, how would you be different and would you be giving up things you like about you." Umm, yes. Overwhelmingly. I'm a bothersome, bossy, know-it-all but I like that I can devour information and take it with me. I also like that people can count on me to get things done.
And, I would add, and have already written deeply about this, the facts of my family are these - there was love, but not without issues, and what that has meant for me is that I learned early, I learned profoundly, how to make my way outside of my family. How to not just strike out on my own, but to get wherever I was going and make for myself in that place another family to count on. There is a very real way in which I might not have the friend-families I am so often awed by if I hadn't had the bio-family I was sometimes disappointed by. I wouldn't give that up. I just wouldn't.
But, when I think of getting ready to plan kids that I want to raise, I'm no longer as sure that two is the magic number. I have a friend who recently decided to NOT have more children. She has a daughter that she loves magnificently, and when she told me this, she admitted it was "selfish." She said she felt she was supposed to give her child a sibling, and I countered that bringing a child into the world not for the fact of him or herself, but to do a job for her firstborn wasn't healthy either. Finally, what she said was, "It's a crap shoot though. I could have another child and they could be close, or I could have another child and they could care less about each other. " Yes . . . and, I would add, all of the reasons she has decided that doing another year of pregnancy, followed by a year of tending to an infant are not what will make her blissful and glowing shouldn't be discounted. When parents are happy, and stable and feel comfortable with the life they're making for themselves, they are undeniably more able to provide content, stable homes for their children. This much I know from my view outside of the parent circle.
All of this is a moot point for me, at this stage, because I am who I am and trying to turn back the clock even as a mental exercise, yields little reliable information but it makes much more deeply interested in the decisions my friends make about kids and building their families, and in the argument for siblings being the other pieces of yourself vs. never having to fight with them in the first place.
Maybe the point is this: my parents were, in a moment that held a world of pressure and lightheartedness all at once (it's impossible to describe the conversations that happen when someone is dying, or how you find yourself in those conversations. It just is.) able to boil each of us down to one, succinct characteristic. They stand in front of us, and for so long, above us knowing us by making choices for us and seeing what came of them. We know each other on a playing field where we all see each other level. Our parents were the soccer coaches, but we were the players. There were different roles in that game, but because I stand level with my brothers and my sister I can see them differently, and as more than one thing. We're all smart. We're all funny. We aren't all athletes, but hey, I'm sorry, I can't be good at everything. (It should be enough that I make award winning soup!) To be sure, we have different gifts and struggles, but there is more of us that is alike, as a unit, than different. Someday my sister and I will talk about being mothers together, and my brother will walk me down the aisle, while the other walks with my mother. I can't deny the power of those relationships, the shared stories are powerful alone.
But, it doesn't change the unanswered question of what I am capable of as a parent. I can't assume I would escape the statistics and manage to somehow not damage my kids through favoritism. It is true that I am often a 1% case when it comes to how medical knowledge understands this person we call Christie, but let's be honest - psychologically it's not hard to trace my path, eh? I suppose, much like my friends who have recently had children, I would have to see how that all plays out. Maybe, like my friend above, I'd discover that having parts of my pre-child lifestyle back were more crucial than raising a second child. Maybe like my other friend I would arrive, within three months, to the conclusion of, "I love this child so much it's indescribable. And, I'm also not a stay at home mom."
Because I really almost certainly can't have children, these choices are unlikely to be thrust on me suddenly by biology. I stand apart, able to consider the logistics of when and how to raise children and bring them into my home, and can probably even choose, to some degree, who they will be and where they will come from. It's a specialized vantage point when considering future parenthood. So, when Kluger puts forth that siblings are the dress rehearsal for your life what I think is, "not having siblings is just a different rehearsal for a different show."
Ok, before I close out, let me say this to all my many, many mommy friends. Whatever moments of favoritism have been in your house or not been in your house, please don't be offended by this. I know you all love your babies in ways I can't possibly fathom. I've seen it in action. I also know better than perhaps anyone else that how you act may or may not match up to every feeling you feel at any given moment. Just think about this talk and this book, that's all.
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