I have often shared here on my site about my relationships and what they mean to me. I hold so much value in the people closest to me and I have worked hard over the years to have an amazing support network of fantastic people. However, one relationship that was strained for the longest time was that of my own sister.
Family relationships can often be the most complicated. You are thrown into close proximity with people that you don’t necessarily feel like you align to. I know that is how my sister and I felt as we were growing up. We were such different people that we clashed horrendously, and I wish I could say that we realigned when we got older, but that wasn’t the case.
If anything, as my sister and I got older, the relationship that we shared became even more strained. The differences between us became ever more apparent and if anything, we grew in completely different directions.
In this post I am not going to mention some of the nitty gritty details of our relationship. Somethings should remain behind closed doors and between the two individuals that it is concerning. However, what I am happy saying is that my sister for a very long time was a very angry person. Very high rate, everything was a problem and whether it was for comedic effect or not, there was always a moan.
To live with that, it was very taxing, and I chose to be the polar opposite. By nature, I am like to think that I have a very sunny disposition. I work hard to stay in a positive mindset and even though I have not necessarily been blessed with mental health, I chose to always look on the lighter side of life. However, living with somebody that only saw the dark, was incredibly hard for me.
Because of this, we clashed. And when I say clashed, I mean we fought like cat and dog. Things for hairy at certain points and I know that we made our parents lives incredibly hard with our ongoing and growing feud. No matter what they tried, there was nothing that could seem to bring us together and to be honest for a period, I didn’t want us to come together. I reached a point where I was happy having her absent in my life.
That in itself is incredibly upsetting. I would see my friends with their siblings, and I was incredibly jealous that I didn’t have this. My older sister should have wanted to protect me, do things with me. But instead, she took one look at me and it would instantly boil her blood. I longed for something that I didn’t have. In the end, I even wished that I didn’t have a sibling, because her being missing from my life would have been much easier than the constant negativity.
Throughout all of this, especially as I reached my teenage years, my mental health really took a nosedive and for the first time, I had to seek counselling. Naturally, my turbulent relationship that I share with my sister was often a hot topic and because of how fragile I was at the time, I was advised to distance myself from her.
After attending therapy, one of the things that I often found myself questioning was what I had ever done to deserve so much hate from a family member. Even to this day, it is a question that I still find myself asking.
And that is what I did. I have written posts before about having to distance myself from toxic friendships, but the truth is that my experience on the subject started many years before when I had to do it with my own sibling. From that moment, we didn’t see each other. For years. We saw each other for the sake of our family, and we were civil when we needed to be. But for the best part we had no contact.
But then one day, after years had passed, I got a phone call at work. My phone was resting on my desk, and I saw her name flash across the screen and for a while I just sat and pondered what she could possibly want. I missed the call. Then it rang again.
It turns out that she had just been to the hospital for an 8-week pregnancy scan, and she was in the process of miscarrying her first child. All she wanted, was me. She wanted me to make the long drive to where she lived with her fiancé and support her. She wanted me in the hospital with her, giving the nurses their orders and getting her clear answers. When push comes to shove, she knew that I was the person that could do it for her.
I stayed with her over the next few days and supported her. Things got particularly upsetting as the miscarrying process was underway and it bonded us in a way that I didn’t think was possible. Don’t get me wrong, we had our snappy moments at one another, but for the most part, we seemed like friends. Nobody would have known what our history looked like.
After those few days, I can remember driving home and speaking to my now husband. He asked me if I was going to address things with her. Essentially, I think he held some resentment towards her for what she put me through when we were younger, and it did have an affect on my mental health for a long time.
But rather than drag up the past, I saw it as an opportunity to move on. I was willing to wipe the slate clean, to a certain degree. I would ensure that I had a level of protection in place for how she could be, but if she was willing, so was I.
Now as I look at our relationship today, things certainly aren’t smooth sailing. Again, when I painfully compared to some of my friends and the tightknit relationships that they share with their siblings, we still have some way to go. Plus, I have some incredible friends that I am so close to that they could be my sisters.
What I have come to learn is that the relationship that I now share with my sister is our version of natural. It probably wont ever be easier or the tight relationship that I long for and as the years have passed by, I have had to make peace with that.
The reason why I have shared this post today is because I think people have a certain idea in their heads of how family relationships should be. I wish that mine were all sunshine and rainbows but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Families are messy, crazy and completely bonkers. Mine is no different.
