Siblings not only pick up the slack but also act as decoys

From The Gift of Siblings by Frank Bruni. A lovely essay.

I’m convinced that family closeness isn’t a happy accident, a fortuitously smooth blend of personalities.

IT’S a resolve, a priority made and obeyed.

[snip]

That’s how it goes in a pack of siblings, and I sometimes wonder, when it comes to the decline in fertility rates in our country and others, whether the economic impact will be any more significant than the intimate one. For better or worse, fewer people will know the challenges and comforts of a sprawling clan.

Those comforts are manifold, at least in my lucky experience. With siblings to help shoulder the burden of your parents’ dreams and expectations, you can flail on a particular front with lower stakes and maybe even less notice. Siblings not only pick up the slack but also act as decoys, providing crucial distraction.

[snip]

My siblings have certainly seen me at my worst, and I’ve seen them at theirs. No one has bolted. It’s as if we signed some contract long ago, before we were even aware of what we were getting into, and over time gained the wisdom to see that we hadn’t been duped. We’d been graced: with a center of gravity; with an audience that never averts its gaze and doesn’t stint on applause. For each of us, a new home, a new relationship or a newborn was never quite real until the rest of us had been ushered in to the front row.

My mother and older sister visited this past month. A couple of observations came up pertinent to this essay.

The first was my own realization the evening of the first day, just how easy and relaxed the conversation was. It is similar when you have been travelling and working in other countries and cultures for two or three weeks and then return to your home culture. You don't realize till you return just at what a pitch you have been operating, ever alert, watching for cues, trying to ascertain whether your action or turn-of-phrase in that other culture was well or poorly received. You don't think of this while in the midst. But return home and your radar comes down, you relax, there is much more that you can take for granted and be confident about. It is a significant relief from something that wasn't distressing or even intrusive to your awareness but was real none-the-less.

Likewise with the family. There is a cadence in a family, a reservoir of shared knowledge, assumptions and experiences, a relaxedness from familiarity that just cannot be replicated among any others. You can be more off-hand, more expansive and more confident.

My mother was back for her 63rd high school class reunion (they decided at the last reunion that they had better make them more frequent than five years). We were commenting on the pleasantness for her of having a cohort with whom you share such deep roots. Some of my mother's classmates had been in kindergarten with her. They had shared the Great Depression, World War II, a time and place, careers near and far.

My sister and I then compared this to our own circumstance. My father's career was in the international oil industry and we lived and traveled in far flung locations in diverse environments. The consequence is that there are no cohorts of people with whom we have shared life over long durations. For us, that is simply who we are and we have no regrets whatsoever. There are always puts and takes. What we lose in having a cohort of long intimacy, we gain in breadth of experience and variety: and vice versa.

Our conversation wasn't about recriminations and regrets for what might have been. Rather it resolved in the simplistic and profound observation, as Bruni alludes to, that we are our own cohort. No others shared the distinct experiences of living in South American, African and European countries in the sixties and seventies, of boarding schools and mission schools, of always being the strangers on the outside, etc. Our cohort consists of five. And what a great cohort it is.