Family Ties

With the date for Christmas postage looming, my thoughts have naturally turned to those family members who live further away from my home in Sweden. It's not that I forget about them for the rest of the year, I should point out. But, Humbug or not, Christmas does make you think more. Especially when you don't have a lot of family members to remember. I am one of 4 children in my family. My younger brother died as a newborn infant, so we've always considered ourselves to be a family of 3. But in recent years it's become more important to me to remember my younger brother, Ross. He would be nearly 40 years old today. I wonder how our lives would have been. Would we have been close, would we have been friends ? I wish I had gotten the chance to find out. Probably the hardest part about leaving my former home town was in knowing that I was the last one out, and that I would be leaving my mother and brother with no one to check in on them from time to time at the local cemetary. That saddens me a lot, but I hope that they understand.

So anyway, growing up I was the youngest of 3. My two older sisters were 7 and 9 years older than me. My eldest sister I don't really remember as being around when I was growing up. I remember her being at high school but not really being at home very often. Later on I would understand the reasons behind that. She left home at 17. My other sister I was a little closer with. I remember that she was in her final year at junior school when I started in the same school. So we had that time. She married and moved away in her early 20s and we didn't speak all that often. She wasn't that important to me at the time, as a 15 year old boy. Sadly cancer was to take her in her early 40s. A cruel disease which also took our mother. If there was any bright side to such a horrible thing, it did bring us 3 together durng my sister's final months. We had all gone our ways in life, one sister had moved across country while the other had moved to Australia. I spent too many years trying to disguise a shit marriage so I wasn't terribly good at the contact side of things.

With my father and I agreeing to part ways several years ago, I'm left today with my one remaining sister. She moved to Australia probably 15 years ago now and has built a life there for herself and her family. Prior to our sister dying, we had almost no contact with each other. It wasn't that we didn't like each other, we were just doing other stuff. A terrible excuse. But after our sister's death we made a real effort to strengthen the ties and actually learnt a lot about each other. In a positive way. She was very supportive of my move to Sweden. Actually, she would have supported anything that involved my new wife, who could do no wrong after the miserable creature who had previously roamed the corridors. She even came to visit us a couple of years back, which was really exciting. Since her visit however, things have tapered off considerably. In fact, I could probably count on one hand the number of times I have heard from her this year. My sister is lovely, but a little strange to understand if you don't know her. Thanks to an especially exciting childhood, us kids grew up not having a particularly high opinion of ourselves. As adults we dealt with it in different ways. The younger of my 2 sisters spent a lot of time just looking, well, sad. Me, I spent a lot of time being angry with everyone and anyone. My older sister took a different approach. She decided that she needed to prove that she was as good, or better than, everyone else. I guess to herself. You can admire that for a while, but after a time it starts to enter the creepily obsessive realm. Instead of being satisfied with some of her many brilliant accomplishments, she continues to push herself higher and higher. The problem with that approach is that you never can reach the top, as the top doesn't exist. There will always be something more or someone better. At some point you have to take stock of where you are and be happy with what you have accomplished. I love my sister dearly, but I do worry for her. I worry that she may never reach the point where she can be happy with life and herself. It worries me.

As I said, I used to hear a lot from my sister. There was very little of a personal nature, it was usually a summary of her latest race results, how many people she had beaten and so forth, or news of a new work promotion. All things about what she had done, but very little about her as my sister. But, hey, it was communication and her writing about these things obviously made her happy. That in turn made me happy. The past 12 months have been tough. A couple of race reports but that's been about it. We've continued to send her birthday gifts,Christmas gifts, update emails etc and will continue to do so. I'm going to keep thinking that she enjoys getting things from me. I don't expect anything from her now but it would be nice. While I'll keep giving, the level of happiness does drop a little with each month of deafening silence. My sister and I had it great, for a few years we were just like those families I had read about. It's going to take some time, but I believe there will come a time when she will need her brother again. And I'll make sure that I'm around when that happens.