Our Witnesses

On siblings and becoming

We spend a remarkable amount of time talking about parents. Bookshelves are filled with advice about raising children, healing childhood wounds, and navigating relationships with our mothers and fathers as we become adults ourselves.

But what about the people who shared the back seat? The bunk beds? The whispered conversations after the lights went out?

Siblings occupy an unusual place in our lives — they typically know us before our accomplishments, before our careers, before our spouses, before we’ve carefully assembled the identities we present to the world. They knew us when we were still becoming. Parents give us our beginnings. Siblings witness our becoming.

Psychologists have written extensively about the parent-child relationship, and rightly so. Yet sibling relationships often last longer than any other relationship in our lives. Childhood is only the apprenticeship; the real relationship may last sixty or seventy years. And across that span, something quietly remarkable happens: the very differences that once divided us become the qualities that hold us together.

As children, we spend an astonishing amount of energy becoming different from one another. One becomes the athlete, another the musician. One the peacemaker, another the adventurer. One learns to make everyone laugh while another quietly holds the family together. Those differences can feel like competition when we’re young — proof that we needed our own territory, our own way of being seen inside a crowded house. Years later, they often become gifts instead. The organized sister helps everyone navigate an aging parent’s medical appointments. The adventurous brother plans the family reunion. The quiet sibling becomes the one everyone calls when life becomes overwhelming.

Some sibling relationships become lifelong friendships. Others remain complicated. Some are marked by painful distance, and some end far too soon. Yet they almost always remain significant, because they have witnessed so much. Some people know our story because we told it to them, and other people know our story because they lived it with us. Brothers and sisters belong to that second group. They remember not only what happened but who we were while it was happening. They remember our parents when they were younger. They remember family jokes that make no sense to anyone else. They remember who comforted whom after a difficult day, who got lost on vacation, who always insisted on sitting in the same seat at the dinner table. Most importantly, they remember not just who we were, but who we were becoming.

As a psychologist, I’ve learned that when people tell the story of their lives, siblings often appear at pivotal moments. They are there in stories of joy and heartbreak, rivalry and reconciliation, caregiving and grief. We don’t always recognize how much they have shaped us until we begin telling the story of our lives — and discover that a brother or sister has been present in chapter after chapter.

Witnessing is never a one-way gift. We have also been invited to witness the becoming of our brothers and sisters.

We often imagine that our sibling relationships ended when we left home, when in truth they may have simply changed classrooms. As children we practiced sharing toys and bedrooms. As adults we practice sharing memories, caring for aging parents, celebrating one another’s children, grieving losses, and occasionally finding our way back after years apart.

The relationship keeps asking something of us.

Some relationships shape us because they are intense. Others shape us because they endure. Sibling relationships often do both.

Even estranged siblings continue to matter. Even siblings who have died continue to matter. Not because the relationship never changed, but because they remain witnesses to part of our story that no one else can fully tell. We don’t choose our siblings, and we don’t all experience those relationships in the same way. Some relationships cannot or should not be restored. Some require healthy boundaries. But many deserve more attention than we give them.

If this is likely to be one of the longest relationships of your life, maybe it deserves more intentional care than it often receives. Call your brother. Write your sister. Ask about a story only the two of you remember. Tell them something you’ve never put into words. Thank them for standing beside you through chapters of life neither of you fully understood at the time. Because perhaps one of the quiet practices of a good life is tending the relationships that have witnessed our becoming — not perfectly, not because every story can be repaired, but because what matters deserves our care.

* Author’s Note: The photograph above is one of the earliest pictures of my brothers and me. Looking at it now, I'm struck less by who we were than by who none of us had yet become.