Ever since I separated myself from most of my biological family, I’ve only gotten news from two of my siblings. Which isn’t that different from before, since most of my family doesn’t really share news so much as need to have news dragged out of them. All they really share without extensive prompting is silence or gossip. I got all the silence I wanted by not talking to them and I have historically had zero interest in family gossip, so I never really got news about the extended family outside of holidays or the rare time something was important enough that my mother felt like she had to call people to tell them. Now, though, my siblings are my only sources and they can be unreliable about the family as a whole because one of them doesn’t really talk to the family either and the other just forgets to share stuff until I ask (which I almost never do as a rule) or until something major is happening. All of which is to say is that I learned that my grandmother had a health scare recently (that looked like it could be fatal when I got the initial news but turned out to be decidedly not even potentially fatal by the end of the following day) and that one of my aunts was homeless and in the process of falling out with most of the rest of the family for reasons that, as far as I’ve gathered, are entirely of her own making.
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The Only Good Thing to Come Out of My Childhood is My Younger Siblings
While I’ve probably mentioned my older sibling with some frequence (he is the source of a significant portion of my childhood trauma, after all), I don’t think I’ve mentioned my two of my younger siblings nearly as much. A fact I’d like to rectify as I reflect on a funny moment from a few years ago that I was reminded of yesterday evening while talking with some friends. Given that we’re all from the same difficult family situation, we’ve all got a great deal of individual baggage. A lot of it is similar, but the last few years make it pretty clear that we all reacted to and were harmed by our shared childhood in our own unique ways. As we’ve all done what we each needed to gain distance and perspective, we drifted apart a bit. In the past few years, as I started to work through stuff after our grandfather passed away and opened up about stuff I had previously protected them from and kept hidden, we’ve slowly reconnected and grown closer than ever.
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