Dear Abby: Much younger siblings

[cereta]

DEAR ABBY: I am a 22-year-old male and my brother, "Brian," is 14. When I was 9, our parents split up. After a year, Mom realized she was a lesbian. She is married now to a younger woman, and they are starting a family through in vitro fertilization. Mom's wife is carrying twins -- a boy and a girl.

When I first heard about their plans to conceive, I was devastated. After a few months, Mom and I were able to reconnect and talk about it. I'm happy they're happy, but I'm still uncomfortable with the situation. When the children are born, I am unsure how I will be known. Mom says Brian and I will have "a sister and a brother."

Brian is excited that he will no longer be the youngest. But at my age, as a business owner and in a serious relationship, I prefer to consider Brian my sibling, not the twins. I will love the babies because they are connected to me, but I'm leaning toward being called their uncle or cousin because the twins will not be my blood relations.

I guess I'm "old school," and with all the changes I've experienced in my life I'm not sure I want all of a sudden to say I have new siblings. Is this OK? -- FINDING MY WAY IN CONNECTICUT

DEAR FINDING: I don't think you have to announce anything when your mother's children are born. As long as your relationship with them is a loving one, I don't think the "label" matters.

Comments

[havocthecat]

I come from a vast, sprawling family of relatives with widely disparate ages and not everyone is a "full" blood relative to everyone else. In my family, it doesn't matter if you share a father with the babies. They are still your siblings and should be treated as such. If you have a more or less familiar relationship with them due to age, whatever, but they're family.

I mostly wonder, from the twins' perspective, how hurt they're going to feel when their older brother doesn't want much to do with them. I don't feel bad for the LW. I do feel bad for the kids, because I have yet to meet children who don't take familial rejection very, very personally. Hopefully the soon-to-be-middle child will help make up for the bad feelings.

[recessional]

Does it make me a bad person that one of my first sort of automatic reactions was "you know 'Brian's perspective would make for a great protagonist in a novel"?

I suspect if LW's mother were the egg-donor/carrying the twins he might feel a slightly different kind of conflicted, and that he's honing in on the fact that (GASP) it's just this woman his mother's with who's having a baby with some random guy's sperm and his mother expects him to be FAMILY with these brats!

Which is why I strongly, strongly suspect this is rooted in discomfort with his parents' divorce, discomfort with his mother's sexuality and remarriage, etc, because somehow I don't think he'd be writing this letter if his mother were adopting a child. (If nothing else, because I think everyone KNOWS what the "general" reaction to that would be, ie: you are a horrible person what is wrong with you.)

(Not that people don't FEEL or BEHAVE in bad ways to adopted children, but it's not the kind of thing it's acceptable to SAY in this context.)

[ellen_fremedon]

But how close would people expect LW to be to the twins if this were his dad who was now expecting kids with a younger spouse? He's more than 20 years older, and we don't even know how close he lives to his mother and brother or how often he sees them-- if he visits once a year at Christmas, he's probably not going to have any sort of relationship with the twins at least until they're old enough to use Skype, and if they get to that age and have no interest in him no one would think that was odd.

I mean, I agree that LW is being an awful person here, but I think there's room for a lot of emotional distance from the twins for non-awful reasons.

[recessional]

Oh I think it's entirely reasonable not to have a relationship with them; it's being fixated on the very IDEA of them being acknowledged as his siblings that's icky.

Lots of people don't have close relationships with siblings or half-siblings for a lot of reasons, but they're not so uncomfortable with the idea of those siblings/half-siblings being acknowledged as siblings that they're writing to advice columnists basically looking for public approval of their decision to strip the title. Especially since he focuses on "announcing" - ie on other people knowing.

That's the bit where I go "oKAY kid, ick."

[ellen_fremedon]

Yeah, his whole attitude is pretty horrible. But I do wonder how much of that is pushback against the idea that of course he's going to be as close and involved with these siblings as he is with Brian because FAMILY.

[recessional]

The use of "devastated" in re his mother having new kids at all - rather than "annoyed/frustrated", etc - implies not that much to me.

[kaberett]

oh, absolutely - I just think it's completely apparent from the letter that non-awful reasons are not, in fact, the reason that he's worrying; or he'd have phrased it as "I'm 22 years old and going to have new siblings, I know that large age gaps happen but I have NO IDEA HOW TO NAVIGATE THIS, what sort of involvement in their life is expected/appropriate", rather than... what he actually wrote.

[redbird]

Sure, but that letter reads more like "Dear Abby, I'm about to have siblings 22 years older than me, and I don't live with my parents anymore. Is it okay to be like an uncle who visits sometimes?" or "I feel like an uncle, what do I do if my moms expect me to be the big brother who's there a lot and helps take care of the kids?"

[recessional]

This, very much. It doesn't read "I was devastated when I found out and now don't want people to know I have siblings."

[kaberett]

(mmhmm)