The Sibling You Almost Know
Reader Question: My siblings and I haven't been close in years. We love each other but we don't really know each other anymore. Our mother's health is declining and suddenly we're in each other's lives again. I want something real with them, but I don't know if this is the moment or if I'm asking too much of an already hard time.
You're not asking too much. I want to say that clearly before anything else, because the fact that you're holding this question means you already sense that what's happening is bigger than a medical situation. Something is being asked of all of you, and it isn't only logistical.
What crisis does in families is collapse the distance that everyone agreed, without saying so, to maintain.
For siblings who exist in parallel lives, who love each other across a comfortable remove, who show up for holidays and major events and otherwise keep a kind of cordial orbit, a crisis pulls them into the same experience. Suddenly all the things that were never said are right there on the surface, with nowhere to go and no time to process them carefully.
This is disorienting, but it can also be a threshold.
In family systems work, we understand siblings as a subsystem shaped by the same family, but each occupying a different position inside it (i.e. the eldest who carried responsibility, the one who left, the one who became invisible).
You each grew up in a different version of the same family, organized around different roles, different wounds, and different relationships with the parents you shared. What feels like not knowing each other anymore is often the distance between those separate formations finally becoming visible.
Your mother's illness is doing something that years of ordinary life probably couldn’t, and that’s making the family legible again. Everyone is in position. The old dynamics are likely showing up - who takes charge, who disappears, or who becomes the emotional center. You're watching your siblings and possibly recognizing something you haven't seen clearly in years.
What the lineage holds matters here too.
Families carry unspoken laws about how much closeness is allowed between siblings, about loyalty and hierarchy and who is allowed to need what. Some of what feels like distance between you and your siblings may be inherited architecture in real time. Understanding what your family was organized around, before you were old enough to choose, changes how you move inside it now.
So is this the moment?
It is a moment. But whether it becomes the moment depends on what you do with it and whether your siblings have any capacity to meet you there.
Grief has a way of cracking people open, but it also has a way of making people armor up. You can't know yet which way your siblings will go. What you can know is what you want, and whether you're willing to ask for it even if the timing is hard.
Wanting something real with your siblings while your mother is still here to witness it can be really powerful. That's a profound thing to want. It might be the most important relational work your family ever does.
The way forward doesn’t have to be a family meeting or a hard conversation yet. But it can be getting clear on what you actually want from each of these relationships, separately, before you try to build something together. From that clarity, you can make a move that isn't just reactive to the crisis, but one that plants something that outlasts it.
If you and your siblings would like to use this moment intentionally - to actually find each other, with support - that's work we know how to hold at Venus+Legacy. One of you reaching out is enough to start. Book a call with us.