The metaphor:
On Thursday, my brother- and sister-in-law officially moved into their house here in town. From the past 4.5 years of living near my sister and her husband, and now their two great kids, I know just how awesome it is to live near a sibling, and keep expanding the family. I can’t believe that now Steve’s brother and his wonderful wife have joined the crew!
Even though this recent decision to move is momentous, I started thinking about the principles and priorities that underlie decisions like that. The farther back I traced it, the more I realized: my mom was totally right about everything…including asparagus.
The story:
When my sister and I were growing up, my mom would tell us, “You’ll always be siblings. It’s up to you whether or not you’ll be friends.” We both accepted this as dogma. I think it was the earliest governing principle of my life.
I thought of my friendship with my sister like an invisible third entity under our joint protection. When we got into fights, the pain from our damaged friendship always came to outweigh whatever started the fight. Like when we played The Garden Game, a board game at my grandparents’ that often devolved into bickering. We both remember screaming at each other, cards splayed out on the floor, then resolving it without adult intervention. One of us would say solemnly, “Let’s be friends.” The other would agree with relief. Friendship restored.
The sense of personal stakes separated the sibling/friend principle from a standard parental rule. Rules demanded compliant behavior, like “Eat your vegetables” or “Go to bed on time.” They may have been based on sound rationale, but as a kid, I didn’t feel an immediate enough sense of repercussions to buy in on the principle level. I lacked the perspective to care if I was tired the next day, much less if I developed long-term unhealthy life habits.
Sometimes I obeyed rules, sometimes I rebelled, depending on my mood and how strongly I felt about the request. Take being asked to eat my vegetables. Ideally, I liked them to be disguised by other ingredients: broccoli under blankets of melted cheese, green beans made acceptable by crunchy almonds or chewy spaetzle. Peas were typically permissible, small and sweet. Asparagus was abhorrent, bitter and stringy, worth almost any standoff to try and avoid.
My mom enforced my veggie consumption, but not my friendship with my sister. She left it up to us. I mean, we could tell which outcome she preferred, and her approval felt good, but it was icing on the cake. The cake was the friendship itself. Life was simply better when my sister and I were friends. We were both eager, or at least willing, to spend hours in my grandparents’ pool playing Marco Polo or water volleyball, or in their yard, playing badminton. We made up games where we were a team, trying to break our record for most hits back and forth, so that it didn’t matter that her hand-eye coordination hadn’t yet developed to my level. At home, we played dress-up in the basement or pretend games in the living room. Even if I’d rather be playing My Little Pony, it didn’t feel like a sacrifice to play with her Polly Pockets instead.
Just as I had experience looking out for my sister, playing with her and making her laugh, I had experience acting out my anger, mocking her or hitting her with a math book. I did each of these things because I felt like it in the moment, but their repercussions were immediate. I learned that I had to either resist taking out my mood on her, or come up with a really good apology afterwards, if I wanted her to play with me. Which I did: there’s just no joy in a solo effort to keep up the balloon or pretend the floor is lava.
It was empowering to see how directly my actions impacted the relationship, but humbling that the same was true for her. This meant that our friendship was an equalizer. I was 3.5 years older than she was, but if we were going to be friends, it had to be mutual, just like with kids my own age. This was the power of my mom’s edict: it was obviously true. Hearing my mom say it helped me realize it early on. It also gave the impression of universality.
I got the sense that every set of siblings aspired to a friendship that no external party could either give them or take away. It was up to the siblings alone, to succeed or fail together. So in addition to making my younger sister into my peer, the sibling-friendship principle made me think of us as peers with every set of siblings, everywhere. We were no more or less likely to succeed, or worthy of doing so, than anyone else. We just had to work at it: there was no way out but through.
Of course, not everyone is as lucky in their sibling as I am in mine. I felt that even at the time, seeing the antics of my friends’ younger brothers and cruelty of their older sisters. If I was going to try and be friends with a sibling, I was grateful it was her. In other words, I liked my sister, and even as middle and high school pulled my focus, I kept liking her. We both retained our extensive memory of movie lines and lyrics, but she started developing new skills.
First, she became an impressive athlete. Then I went away to college. When I came back to visit, she’d become bitingly funny, which delighted me even when I was her punchline. She spent a weekend in my DC rowhouse and I showed her how to spread avocado on toast; she studied studio art and gave me paintings that I treasure. She stayed near our hometown during and after college, and for me, she stayed a critical part of the feeling that I was home.
The sibling/friend principle felt as true as ever, but by that point, my life was full of principles. I’d come to feel the stakes of staying up too late or eating too few vegetables. There were new rules, too, like the rent and student loans I owed, and the people ensuring compliance were no longer my parents. I wanted the way I made money to also be a way I made change; I wanted to be quick to make a joke, but quicker to be kind. I didn’t always get these balances right.
Once my sister graduated college, I started wondering if all these rules and circumstances were crowding out my original life principle. As we’d each cycled through college, it was our age that kept us from being there at the same time. Now, the entry level staff and interns I was managing were the same age as my sister. If I was going to spend so much time with someone her age, I wished it could be her.
She and I started talking about how great it would be to live in the same place one day, but neither of us knew enough about our futures to plan for that. It was fall 2012, and within months, I’d be engaged to Steve, who had a pending job offer in LA. Spending time with my sister was a highlight of the upcoming bachelorette party and wedding, even from opposite coasts. Steve and I moved back east after two years, in large part so family visits no longer entailed cross-country flights. Still, that made us New York City citizens working New York City hours: these decisions brought us physically closer but also created a new slew of rules and logistics.
To me, the turning point in my adult relationship with my sister happened on the floor of my Brooklyn apartment, where I was sitting with my laptop while Steve cooked dinner. New Year’s was approaching, and I’d made a Google doc called “Goals + Resolutions.” We were brainstorming for the year ahead: seeing our families at least once a season, hosting dinner parties and buying new plants. We’d been visiting our siblings for years, too, and decided to build on that by separating our sibling relationships from our general family resolutions.
“Invest in sibling relationships: know them as people,” we wrote. In other words, care about them, showing up without needing anything from them. I don’t think our siblings even knew that moment happened, or would’ve noticed a turning point in the second half of the 2010s, but it put a finer point on what friendship entailed between adult siblings in our minds. We didn’t know whether or how it would change the decisions we made, but we began to double down on the priority, raising it above others. The obvious decisions are the moves here: Steve and me in 2020, Steve’s brother and his now-wife last fall. But even before we dreamt of moving here, Steve and I fit two trips into February 2020, before it all shut down: a weekend for me to visit my sister and her then-fiance, and a week-long trip with Steve’s brother and the partner he’d go on to marry.
It is nuts that we all live here now! And so much of it is luck, that we’ve been able to all end up together. There are lots of life logistics still, and lots of little decisions where we can’t or don’t see how to center each other – but having the principle in place means we’re always trying. So my mom was right, all those years ago. At least now, we know to avoid the Garden Game.
The question:
Were there principles or ideas you absorbed from your parents? Have they helped to guide your decisions?
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