Dysfunctional relationships with your siblings?

In my family there are four of us kids and from my perspective we are as different as North, South, East and West. My Mom, in some bizarre way I think, acted kind of like the planet with the magnetic poles that imprinted and determined what North, South, East and West actually were. She was able to imprint us using a unique blend of parenting skills, I am not saying it was good, I am not saying it was bad but I cannot deny the imprint that I received, I can see her distinct imprint on my siblings as well. We even lead our lives in a way that mirrors the north, south, east and west. I have a brother that lives 1219 miles to the north by north west, my sister lives 885 miles north west and my other brother lives 613 miles to the north. From my location I would not even go by one of their locations on my way to one of the others, unless I went out of my way.

Each of us siblings are about 3 years apart in age but a lot further than that when talking about what kind of people we are. The only thing in common for us is my mother, which leads me to believe it was not her fault that we ended up like we did, although I am sure each of us like to think it is sometimes. If it were solely her influence wouldn’t reason dictate that we would have been at least similar? We each had Mom at different times in her life, and she developed over time just like all of us do. My sister for example lived with Mom until she remarried and then at age 14 my sister moved in with my Dad, once she finished that school year she moved back into Mom’s new life and it took her less than two years before she struck out on her own, child on the way. As for me I made it until I was 13 at which time I moved away to live with my Dad, the rifle he got me at Christmas precipitated that move which is a story for another day. One of my brother’s stayed at home for 18 years and my other brother, who was five when our families merged, left around 15 or maybe it was 16 to live with his grandparents after the death of Mom’s second husband.

So why could it not be her fault, when it seems like it might be related. If you have four of the exact cultures in Petri dishes and you change, or add something to the environment they inhabit the experiment could, and most likely would produce 4 distinct outcomes. Bear with me a moment, think of Mom as the Petri dish, us kids as the cultures and the change in environment as the additional ingredients that were added to the experiment. Mom and the kids are the constants and the environment is the thing under test. So what was so different about our environment, what were the extra ingredients that were added? My sister and I had the young Mom, married to our Dad when she was the optimist, the cheerful Mom that was kind and positive, although understanding how challenging our lives actually were I am not sure why she like that, our family struggled financially after my Dad left. My brothers on the other hand had a different Mom, I am not sure why she changed but she did I suspect it had something to do with the worries of financial woes were gone. They had Mom when she was married to my youngest brothers father, her second husband. Life was different for Mom then, and it was a vastly different life for them than that of me and my sister. The constant financial pressure was gone and that meant vastly different standards of living between us four kids growing up. They also grew up in a medium sized city in Ohio and then moved to Pittsburgh a year or so after I left. Life, and the experiences a kid can have are vastly different in the country when compared to city life.

In some ways I am sad about the way our family ended up, in others I am not. When Mom died we could not even agree on how or when to get together as a group to mourn her passing, and we did not and probably will not. That is probably as much my fault as anyone else’s, oddly though I feel unapologetic about it and decided not to be sad about that. Mom had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for some time so her death had not been a surprise to us, I had not waited until she passed to attempt to make my peace, with her and with the brutal disease that took her. I grew up to be a very independent person who does need validation from anyone so how I mourned her passing was mine alone to deal with and I did not think that getting the four corners of the earth together would help me or them individually deal with Mom’s passing. It is a long story but the whole ordeal was and still is actually quite funny for me, I know, not words one would normally associate with the passing of a parent but it is what it is. I do not hope and am not going to pursue making things better or even different between us siblings, like I said I don’t need validation and I am VERY content with the way my life turned out, hell I consider myself the luckiest man alive. Having or not having a relationship with my siblings will have little impact on my life, my only hope is that someday they could be as content with their lives as I am with mine, hell they might be and I just don’t know it.

So is your family that dysfunctional?