Tag: siblings

Softening the blow

Siblings, Galit Atlas writes ‘are our first peers, rivals, witnesses and companions, a source of love, envy, compassion and identification. So much of competitiveness and envy is shaped by our experience of siblings.’ And as other psychoanalytic folks write, it’s a horizontal influence rather than the one most often explored, the vertical influence of parents, from top down.

When I was small I felt no great need for friends outside of my family. My siblings were my friends, especially those closest in age, my two slightly older brothers and my younger sisters. My older sister led the way, and the two eldest brothers belonged to the realm of adults and therefore counted less, except as further authority figures who came and went. While the two below them and the one below me were my best friends. 

We spent hours, weeks, months in one another’s company and their presence softened the blows of all the abuse we copped at the hands of our father.

I well remember the story of the babes in the wood, two children orphaned and left to fend for themselves. Together they wandered lost through a forest, and exhausted, stopped at the base of a tree where they died. Soon a Robin redbreast covered them in leaves. But no, as Atlas writes, ‘Abuse in families separates siblings into what she describes as ‘a solitary survival strategy, while aggression in the family can be enacted among the children.’ 

Juliet Mithell in her turn writes about the law of the mother, a law that ensures siblings do not kill one another, but as each new baby arrives, supplanting the one before, the child enduring the arrival of a sibling must learn the difference between the same and other. Before the new baby comes along there is a sense this baby will be the same as me.  But after the baby is born, comes the realisation, this baby is other than me. The toddler, or older child whatever age, will need to find ways of coping with the arrival of this rival and it’s their mother’s awareness of the pain of this and her efforts to help them negotiate the new order that makes all the difference.

I well remember the jealousy I felt towards my immediately younger sister. The way I considered her so much more beautiful than me. It rankled. My mother told the story of how walking along with my sister in her pram people stopped to admire the baby while, toddling alongside, I attracted none of their admiration. 

Years later, she told me how she tried to soften the blow by alerting admirers to me but it made little difference. I continued in my jealousy towards my beautiful sister who looked more like our dark-haired movie star mother, at least in her youth, while I took after my father with my long face, fair hair and less well-balanced features. 

Small things like this matter when you’re little. The understanding I gained here from my analyst stays with me still. 

She pointed out how my mother found it difficult to tolerate the competition and rivalry between us siblings. When we argued and fought, she fell in a heap, weeping. ‘How can you behave so?’ She was the eldest of her tribe of seven, followed by five brothers and only one sister, a twin six years younger. 

Atlas describes the eldest, like my mother, as the ‘melancholic child’, one who has endured early loss repeated again and again depending on the number of children.

In any case, when I told Mrs Milanova about my jealousy towards my sister and my mother’s disapproval of such feelings, she suggested it was not helpful to disapprove of any uncomfortable feelings. 

Feelings such as jealousy need understanding. It’s a painful feeling, and let’s face it, it’s universal for us all at various times in our lives. If you then get the message from your parents that there’s something wrong with you for feeling this way, then the feeling is ten times worse.  And you feel bad for feeling it in the first place. 

You cannot help a feeling. Feelings come on us unbidden. But it helps to interrogate them first before responding rather than simply reacting.

And it’s not easy.

A psychological sandwich

I am my mother’s daughter. When I was in my early twenties, when I first began to develop a will of my own, when I first discovered the thrill of rebellion and quietly thumbed my nose at my mother’s religiosity and what I then saw as her prudery, and began to favour the company of men – what I have called my ‘promiscuous’ years – my mother took to writing me letters.

My mother writes letters still even though we live less than twenty kilometers apart. She writes to all her children as a means of stating her case.

My mother’s letters to me are ‘psychological sandwiches’. They begin with protests of her love for me. The middle carries the sting. What do you think you are doing? Who do you think you are? Behaving so loosely with men. Where are your morals?

Then she might end the letter with a short vignette: her memory of me as a little girl in a yellow jumper and tartan skirt, after she had come home from hospital with my new baby sister, when I was less than two years old and had been left in the care of my godparents, the Kaandorps, for over a week.

In her letter my mother remembers me then as the little girl who threw herself into her mother’s arms and wept for the sheer joy of being together again. If only, my mother writes, if only she could give to me now the things I needed then. It is as if she wishes that I had never grown up, that I had never entered into the world of adulthood, of conflict and of challenge. If only I had stayed little, then our bond might be secure.

I have been reading Nancy Miller’s Bequest and Betrayal:memoirs of a parent’s death, a book about adult children who write about their parents after death. Are these memoirs eulogies, songs of praise for parents now gone, or are they betrayals of parental secrets?

I suspect I could not write about my father as I do now were he not dead. Now he is dead, I am safe.

Will the way I write about my mother change after her death? My mother in my mind has undergone so many metamorphoses, from the woman I adored as a small child to the woman I became scornful of, though not in adolescence, even in adolescence I felt protective of her and needy, to the frail old woman she has finally become, of whom I feel protective in a different way. It took a long time before I dared to feel critical of my mother in any way.

It was later in my life, in my twenties and thirties when I had embarked on my analysis, only then did my image of my mother start to crack. Only then did I come to feel critical of her, for her religious intolerance, her manipulative tendencies, and her tendency to pretend that all is well when it is not.

I have my mother’s name, all three names, Elisabeth Margaretha Maria. It is a Dutch tradition to name the second daughter after the mother, and the first daughter after the mother’s mother, a tradition that again alerts us to the significance of mothers in a woman’s life.

I did not name my first daughter after my mother or any of my daughters directly after me, but my husband insisted and I agreed to the idea that they should all have my name as a second name. Equality you might say. Their first names however belong entirely to them.

Even now I can imagine my daughters writing in the future about what it means to them to each share their mother’s name between their first and last names.

In my family of origin, we each bear the name Maria, another tradition, religious this time, a means of asking the Blessed Virgin Mary to look over us all. All except the oldest, who again according to Dutch tradition was given his father’s name in its entirety.

When we were little we laughed at the fact that even the boys carried the name Maria in their collection of personal names, Simon Peter Maria, Franciscus Wiro Maria, Michael George Maria and Gregory Paul Maria. Such odd names they seemed to us growing up in Australia in the fifties and sixties when most people’s names were Celtic and Anglo Saxon with the odd immigrant name from the Mediterranean or Europe thrown in for good measure.

Names matter, they are identifying features, they become part of our sense of ourselves and of our identity.

In the days when I fancied I might write a book in which I had hoped each of my siblings might contribute a chapter, I also imagined a paragraph on each of us, suggesting parallels between our first given name and the way in which our name reflects our personalities.

As usual I am running off into too many ideas, too many ideas to follow. One leads into the other and the track becomes unwieldy. It is difficult to back track to where we have come from. Sorry.