"Sibling goals. 👌"/"Best fam ever 😍"/"can i be a metzger"/"My favorite family"/"cutest family ever 😍"
These are comments on an Instagram picture that my sister posted. I'm not making this up. People might be excessively loving towards us, but it's real, and I would never complain. Everyone loves receiving affection, but this feels even more special to me, because I'm receiving it as part of a unit. This unit is incomplete without me; I'm critical to its existence... and so are two others. I need my younger siblings Jake and Grace for the completion of this silly and yet magnetic squad.
I can't remember life without them. Sometimes my mom will share an anecdote from when I was two years old or younger, and I know that my brother wasn't present during those stories... but I can't imagine it. I don't have real memories like that.
The memories I do have embarrass me. One time I sold them paper clothes that I had badly fashioned for stuffed animals. Like, I convinced them that they should give me their real money for something I had spent 2 minutes making. And I can remember complaining to my mom, telling her that I had ALREADY played with Jake and Grace for an hour, that I just wanted to be by myself and read my books. But she told me to be nice to them. That was unconditional.
My mom told me to value my relationship with my siblings even in the moments when my underdeveloped mind believed that they existed solely to annoy me. And THAT is why I think we are friends now. We didn't "grow up together" just in the sense that we lived in the same house. We "grew up together" in the sense that we made thousands of inside jokes, had hundreds of little fights, and overall achieved a deep knowledge of one another that nobody else (except a parent) can match.
I have been dating someone for four years; people say, "That's a LONG time!" And obviously we have worked hard, worked together to know one another well. But in my friendship with Jake and Grace, we have had 16 years to get to know one another.
We have done everything together. At some point, it wasn't up to our mom anymore... we had to make choices to continue to do the same things, to share interests and inside jokes. But we did that, and it wasn't hard work. It wasn't even a conscious choice. We just like a lot of the same things. It's magical that I got to do theater in my last year of high school with both my brother and my sister. We all edited the same literary magazine that year. I am so unexpectedly lucky. No one can really plan anything like this.
(To be followed by Part 2...)