My Sisters' Keeper, and Being Kept

Growing up One of Five Sisters

I’m one of five girls in a family of six kids. Five daughters. One son.

And somehow, we all survived.

We grew up in a three-bedroom house with my mom, my dad, my brother, and five girls trying to figure out how to exist in the same physical space. Privacy was basically a luxury none of us could afford.

We stole each other’s clothes.

We borrowed each other’s makeup—sometimes without asking.

We fought over space, mirrors, bathrooms, clothes, boys, parents, and whose version of the story was actually the truth.

We pulled hair. We pinched. We yelled.

And then, eventually, we hugged.

That's the strange mathematics of sisterhood: you can be furious with someone and still be the first person standing beside them when life falls apart.

Over the years, we have watched each other experience heartbreak, marriage, divorce, motherhood, illness, addiction, loss, and reinvention. We've brought different characters home. Some we liked. Some we definitely did not. And some taught us, in one way or another, what an unkind person looks like.

There is a toughness in my sisters. Sometimes even a roughness. But underneath it is tenderness and vulnerability—the complicated process of five girls figuring out what it means to become women.

We figured out femininity and confidence while simultaneously comparing ourselves to one another. We learned how we wanted to dress, love, parent, fight, succeed, and be seen. We were constantly becoming ourselves while also seeing ourselves reflected in one another.

It's a strange thing to be cut from the same cloth.

One of my sisters and I share so much of the same face that facial-recognition technology has occasionally decided we are the same person. Facebook has tagged the wrong sister more than once.

Apparently, even technology can't keep us straight.

But resemblance isn't the same as sameness.

We have different personalities, relationships, wounds, strengths, and ways of remembering our childhood.

Sometimes we even disagree about whether we had the same childhood at all.

Because the truth is, we didn't.

We grew up in the same house, but we weren't the same children. We didn't experience our parents in exactly the same way because parents are different people at different stages of their lives. We weren't looking at the same family from the same vantage point. We had different ages, circumstances, responsibilities, relationships, and experiences shaping what we saw.

And memory is a funny thing.

Sometimes we carry a memory with absolute certainty, only to discover that it belongs, at least partly, to someone else.

"Wait. That was you?"

"No. That happened to me."

"I swear that was my story."

Maybe that's part of growing up in a big family: learning that your memories aren't always as singular as you thought they were.

We were witnesses to one another.

We watched each other become teenagers.

We watched each other fall in love.

We watched each other get hurt.

We watched marriages begin and sometimes end.

We watched each other become mothers.

And there is something particularly strange and beautiful about watching your sisters become mothers.

These girls you once fought with over the bathroom are suddenly raising children of their own.

The girls you pulled hair with are now holding babies.

The girls who once stole your clothes are now giving parenting advice.

Time has a sense of humor.

We've celebrated each other's wins and shown up when things were hard. We've sat with one another through heartbreak and uncertainty. We've stayed up at night worrying about each other. We've sat in delivery rooms. We've held babies. We've watched one another become people we couldn't have imagined when we were six, ten, or fifteen years old.

And somewhere along the way, I began to understand that our family wasn't just shaping our individual personalities. It was also teaching us how to relate to other people.

That is one of the fascinating things about family systems: long before we have the language for relationships, we're already practicing them.

We learn how to fight.

We learn how to make up.

We learn when to speak up and when to stay quiet.

We learn how to compete, protect, rescue, tease, comfort, and sometimes overstep.

We learn where the boundaries are—and sometimes where they aren't.

We learn what gets attention.

We learn what gets ignored.

We learn how much responsibility we feel for other people's feelings.

And those patterns can follow us long after we leave the family home.

Sibling relationships can be particularly complicated because there is so much history packed into them. The lines between caring, rescuing, overreaching, and over-identifying can become blurry. We can know someone so well that we anticipate their reactions before they even speak.

And that's both a gift and a liability.

My sisters know my triggers.

I know theirs.

When we're angry and really want to hurt one another, we know exactly where to go for the jugular.

That's the uncomfortable side of intimacy: knowing someone deeply can give you a map to their most vulnerable places.

But that same knowledge can be used in a completely different way.

We know how to lift each other up.

We know when someone needs a laugh, a giggle, a ridiculous inside joke, or simply a look across the room that says, I know.

Sometimes a sister can offer comfort that no one else quite can—not because she has the perfect words, but because she remembers.

She remembers the little girl.

She remembers the teenager.

She remembers the family.

She remembers the version of you that existed before you became the person everyone else knows.

And maybe that's why sibling relationships can be so powerful.

They can mirror parts of us that we don't always see ourselves.

They can challenge us.

They can trigger us.

They can remind us of old roles we thought we'd outgrown.

And they can also remind us that we are loved by someone who has known us for a very, very long time.

If you come from a family with siblings—especially sisters—you probably understand some version of this intricacy.

The teasing.

The competition.

The loyalty.

The arguments.

The inside jokes.

The complicated boundaries.

The history.

The love.

Family dynamics are messy because they're formative. They become part of the blueprint from which we learn relationships. Sometimes as adults, we have to decide which parts of that blueprint still serve us and which parts need to be rewritten.

Five girls.

One brother.

Six kids.

One small house.

One bathroom.

A lifetime of shared memories, competing memories, arguments, laughter, heartbreak, triumphs, mistakes, babies, marriages, divorces, illness, recovery, and reinvention.

We're not the same.

We don't have to be.

We don't have to remember everything the same way, agree on everything, or even always understand one another.

We can have our quirks, our weaknesses, our blind spots, and our vulnerabilities.

And maybe that's the point.

We were cut from the same cloth, but we didn't become the same person.

Each of us took the pieces of our family, our childhood, and one another—and made something different with them.

We don't have to have the same story to belong to the same one.

We don't have to always like each other.

But underneath all of it is this strange, enduring knowing:

You are one of mine.

And after a lifetime of stealing each other's clothes, fighting over bathrooms, pulling hair, making each other laugh, worrying about each other, sitting in delivery rooms, and showing up for one another—

I think that's pretty damn special.

Sincerely Your Sister,

Mandy