Blood, Not So Simple

I received an email today. It was unexpected. Nearly ten years have passed since the last time the sender and I had any communication. With the email there was an invitation to visit her myspace page; a page filled with her life, pictures of her children and her fiance. It was otherworldly, not just because so much about her has changed, not because our worlds seem so different, not because it was at once both familiar and foreign; no, it was otherworldly because she is my sister.

My mother and father divorced when I was three. He remarried a woman with a daughter from a previous marriage - my stepsister. That marriage then produced my half-sister, M, six years younger than I. Much of our childhood was spent together, usually on weekend visits with my father. She was my little sister.

There is a photo of us, me, my brother, and my sister, sitting at the dinner table together. In it we are smiling, young. We are siblings, the woven connections of DNA apparent in our similarities. It is hard to remember that time and were it not for the photo, that part of my life might have slipped away. How is that possible?


When my mother remarried and we moved to another state my contact with M grew less frequent. I saw her on occasional visits back to my home state. When my father and her mother divorced the contact became even rarer. Eventually, as we entered adulthood, we saw one another only at funerals; first our father's, then our brother's. As our paths diverged, she married, had two daughters, and divorced. There were attempts at contact, but they failed - I lacked the dedication, the effort, I think. Since our last interaction, I have gotten married and had two children of my own, children she has never seen.

Though we share blood, we are different - nuture trumping nature. I feel the pull of sibling attachment, of a shared past and parent, but I feel as if I do not know her at all. My brother and I were extraordinarily close - inordinately, as a friend once described us - and that may be part of the problem. Perhaps after losing my brother, committing to another sibling meant potentially painful consequences. Add to that the fact that she and I have no shorthand. We have no subtle clues to one another's moods and our history is limited. A lifetime of shared memories and home experience is not available to us. Yet there is the blood - always, the blood. There is the sense of what we are and where we come from. Shouldn't that be enough?

We are a generation of blended, and not so blended, families. Our parents divorced and recoupled, producing offspring that share genes, but perhaps not lives. What do we do with that? What do we do with family that is neither nuclear nor extended, but something in between? How do we resolve the bonds of step and half, grandparent-raised cousins and far-flung siblings?

Time can fill the space between us like a rising sea, making islands of us all. It can fill it so deeply that one can drown trying to cross the void. My children have cousins; they have an aunt. They should know them. My sister is getting remarried in the fall. Maybe it is time to empty that drowning pool and pull, gently, on the threads that bind us together. Blending, yes, blending.

clockwise from left, me, my brother, my step-sister, my sister.