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There is something profoundly special about the bond of siblinghood, entirely unique yet universal. How your siblings know everything about you. The worst parts of you, before you realized you were being perceived and evaluated, before you realized that you could have a lasting impact on others. Your siblings witnessed and experienced every part of you as you became you. They experienced your cruelty and your famine. They witnessed your tenderness and your pain. They got pegged in the face by a basketball you threw at an arm’s length.

Siblings know your middle school email address and would tell anyone who asked in a heartbeat. They saw you lose monopoly and they heard you slam doors. They know when you started wearing training bras and that one time you got food poisoning. They know your obscure references and just what to say to piss you off. They saw you lose your spark, bewildered by how suddenly a person can change, wondering if you would ever be the same, predicting what would happen to them. They saw you reinvent yourself over and over again and did so themselves, somehow transforming while remaining unchanged.

When meeting new people, one of my favorite things is to ask about their siblings: how many? Brothers or sisters? Birth order? I find myself at ease when people reminisce on the simplicity of their childhoods, a space occupied, usually cramped, by road trips and fights and games and inventions and performances with one’s siblings. To have siblings is to bear witness to the fullness of one’s being and becoming. To have siblings is to know how to hold the ugliness, beauty, mundanity, and complexity of an entire person, to accept them without conditions or expectations of change. 

It’s usually pretty easy to guess where someone lands on the sibling scale. I always know an eldest child when I see one: their ambition and their drive, an exterior of confidence and self-assuredness, the exhaustion and fear that rest right beneath the surface. I feel at ease around younger siblings, the grace with which a middle child keeps the peace and nurtures a conversation without being intrusive or overbearing; the grit and resilience of a youngest child, self-sufficient, naturally entertaining, outspoken, and secretly sensitive to the tides of love. 

Gender dynamics in siblinghood also put me at ease. When I learn that a boy has a sister (or two or three), I relax into his knowing about the private, hidden nature of femininity. There is a gentle groundedness in his soul that knows woman beyond sexual objectification and has experienced the fierce, creative, unruly force of girl- and womanhood. My own having a brother lets me see past the hollow performances of patriarchy and extend compassion toward the plight of men. Underneath the puffed chests and facades of disinterest, I see a 3-year-old boy obsessed with elephants and dinosaurs, spiderman underwear and a hot cheetos tattoo right in the center of his protruding belly.

When I hear of sisterhood, I am invigorated by the ferocity of this love. Between sisters, honesty cuts through all bullshit. Moments of connection, support, and lighthearted togetherness oscillate quickly with fire, passion, anger, frustration, and annoyance. There is no hiding in sisterhood: everything is on display at all times and will be called out for exactly what it is. And despite the cutting harshness of this dynamic, a sister may be bruised but never burned because underlying the harshest critique is unshakeable love and trust.

Siblinghood is an organism in and of itself, made up of its component parts and existing in perfect homeostasis. My being makes perfect sense in the context of my siblings. The weight of my ambition is balanced by my brother’s carefree ease and my sister’s unshakeable love & self-advocacy. I provide logistical advice to my younger siblings in exchange for practical wisdom on how to enjoy this life. We easily morph to take the opposite side of an argument, unfrightened of causing tension or damaging egos. We are a perfect balancing act, independent and unique yet inseparable from this larger living whole.

In a world where my existence often feels like a performance evaluated by those who only partially know me, siblinghood is my refuge. Here, there is no performance and no possibility of performance. The essence of who I am – the beautiful, the ugly, the embarrassing – is so deeply known by my siblings that there is no hiding it. No matter the curated image I build and put out into the world, my siblings see beyond it as a haphazard attempt to simplify an infinitely complex human being. No matter how hard I try to be mollytomlin00@gmail.com, Francie and Nick will always know me as jolly.molly.tomlin@gmail.com. They watch my silly games of reinvention and improvement with tenderness, amusement and patience, always ready to guide me back to who I’ve always been.

For that, among many other things, I love them dearly.