Siblings

Hello everyone, welcome back to Blogville. I appreciate that each of you come back to read about my thoughts and I truly enjoy reading the comments that some of you are comfortable in sending my way. Thank you. Today I am sipping a blood orange based herbal tea while I write this blog. I hope you gain some insight from reading it.

As you know, I teamed up with one of my maternal birth sisters to write and self-publish a book to help families talk with their children about adoption and kinship. Krista, my birth sister, illustrated the book. It was an accidental project that I am actually really proud of. As an adopted person, being proud of things takes an extra effort, given that I was never really meant to exist on the planet. But I am really proud of our book.

So, one day I was speaking with a friend about my book and explaining how I had teamed up with a maternal birth sister to create it. My friend looked at me and asked, “Why do you say ‘birth sister’ when talking about Krista and not just ‘my sister’? I thought about what she just said and replied, “That’s a great question.”

When I hear the word siblings, I think of my brother right away. We are not blood related but we were raised by the same parents, and parented as brother and sister. I wonder if I think of sibling relationships being like the one my brother and I have is a result of having shared parenting parents and childhoods, rather than having shared a womb? I only ever refer to him as my brother, without feeling the need to qualify by saying my adopted brother. Hmmmm.

Come to think of it, whenever I am talking with people about my parents the term ‘real parents’ often comes into the discussion (from them, not from me). For some reason, most folks seem to think of my adoptive parents as just that, the parents who adopted me. But when I am talking about my birth parents, often people will question if I mean my ‘real’ parents. It occurs to me that when I talk about my biological siblings, those born to my birth parents, no one ever asks if I mean my ‘real’ siblings. Isn’t that interesting?

Getting back to my friend’s question, I wonder if I refer to Krista as my birth sister because I do not think I am entitled to just say ‘my sister’. I did not have that role with Krista, nor with any of my birth mother’s other daughters while growing up. We did not even meet until after our birth mother had passed away. Being a sister typically means more than sharing blood, especially blood from only one birth parent, doesn’t it? Apparently I think it has to do with being parented as siblings more than being blood related. When I watch my maternal birth half-sisters together I can see, and feel, their history as sisters. This also applies to my birth father’s other children.We do not share childhood experiences and relationships, nor any kind of history together that I feel makes us ‘true’ sisters and brothers. 

It’s funny that when I refer to my older birth sister (also named Lynne, but that is a topic of a different blog lol) I do not say ‘birth sister’. I usually say Lynne is my older half-sister who was also placed on adoption, but separately from me. In truth, I am as biologically related to Lynne as I am to my maternal and paternal half-siblings but I feel differently toward her than the others. I wonder if I feel this way as a result of having shared relinquishment and adoption journeys, rather than having been raised and parented together? Even though we were raised apart, in many ways I feel that we are ‘sisters in adoption’ if you will, through our shared birth mother, our relinquishments, and our adoption journeys.

Being a sister usually, but not always, means sharing a history. Perhaps that explains a little why I refer to my (also adopted) brother as my brother, to Lynne as my half-sister, and to the children raised by my birth parents as my birth half-siblings. Frankly, I’m not sure. I do love hearing parental stories from my birth half-siblings about my birth parents. It helps me to get to know them as people and as parents. It helps me to hear how they were with their other children. Sometimes it hurts too, to have missed being raised by them. I even wonder what my life might have been like if my birth parents had married and raised me together. Please know that this is no reflection on my ‘real’ parents (as I see my adoptive parents to have been) or how they raised me, but a simple curiosity about what might have been without relinquishment and adoption in my life.

I do know that when I am not invited to events in the lives of my birth half-sisters such as their children’s weddings, I truly understand. I love to look at the photos they send or post and cannot seem to stop myself from seeking out physical resemblances between me and the adult children of my half-siblings, or even between my children and theirs. I am not offended by not being invited because I believe that I am too hard to explain to the other wedding guests. I believe they are respecting their mother’s privacy, even her reputation if I’m being honest, and I respect that. Her daughters clearly loved and respected their mother as her children should. That I share some DNA with these women is a source of pride for me. 

I remember how interesting it was when my older half sister Lynne attended my daughter’s wedding. People were intrigued by the fact that we had been able to find each other despite having been separated by the adoption system. No one was more curious than my mom. She was both intrigued by Lynne’s story and upset that she and my dad had not been given the opportunity to raise us together, or at least, upset that we were not able to have been raised together as sisters. She thought that this had been a system failure, and I can’t say I disagree. Until her passing, my mother always asked about Lynne and whether or not we had been in touch lately. 

In the end, I cannot express how much it means to me to have contact with the children of my birth parents, aka my half-siblings. When I think of each of them today, I don’t worry about titles, I simply wonder how my sisters and brothers are doing. 

As ever, thank you for reading. I love that you visit me in Blogville and look forward to your comments either here, or more privately through my email at [email protected] 
Until next time…