Happy April 10th! As we celebrate National Sibling day I think of how lucky I am. I was brought up with 3 siblings; 2 older brothers B39, B48 and a younger sister 31. We have always been a close family, through thick and thin I’d call it. Speaking from my perspective, we grew up in Sydney, Cape Breton in a small home that had all the needs and a few wants. Dad worked on the road with the service bureau and we didn’t see him around much during those years. Fortunately, he did this though or we wouldn’t have had a roof over our head. I spent these years very close to my Sister as we were only 5 years apart…took turns playing GI- Joe meets Barbie or singing to each other and putting on plays. My brothers of course being older were off chasing for girls or hanging with the guys and sometimes getting themselves into a wee bit of trouble at times. Never anything too serious, at least not in the nature that the police would be called, I think more for the fact that they wish the police were called as dad was going to be mad!
As I grew, even my sister and I grew apart, now we still loved each other, but I found friends my own age and it just wasn’t cool anymore. She would get upset if I had my friend over and we hogged the TV with the latest game on the Texas instruments or Atari … yeah I remember those. Back when you didn’t need a half hour to choose a game and there was one or two buttons on the controller… I would say at this point in my life (10 years old) little crushes on school girls occurred and I was starting to find myself as a boy in this big thing called life. We moved to New Brunswick in 1989 (Leaving my brothers behind) which is what I could only describe as absolute hell. During the first few months I suffered extremely with migraines and nausea that came from between the home sickness and life changes. We moved due to the working conditions for my father changed and he had a pretty large family to take care of.
I can honestly say that from 1989 – 2010 life between us siblings has been a blur. There have been moments we wanted to beat the tar out of each other (Never happened) as well as moments we cried together. We were always taught by our parents that no matter what amount of money you have, it solve nothing other than creating problems that you don’t want. They also taught us that Family is everything and to always be there for each other, and that will indeed be the case through thick or thin. We never held grudges for long, always talked everything out and most importantly, told each other we loved them. At this point in time my brothers live about 20min away from me, my parents have an ensuite in which we live in the main portion and my sister lives across Canada in Fort MacMurray. Even though I may not speak with them every day, they are always in my heart and thought of. If I could ask you to take one thing away from this is that you need to tell your family old and young that you love them so they hear it any time you can.
What a great post! Thanks for the reminder 🙂