Family Systems... There is no cure for being a sister, and there is certainly no cure for having one.

Having seen my brother for the first time in two years, I spent some time as we traveled home thinking about our family, our relationships, and how strange it all is.  I cannot tell if I am blessed or cursed; I've decided this means I am both.

Life with siblings is strange; it is a balance between comfort and discomfort, knowing and unknowing, familiarity and distance.  It is at once like looking at onself in the mirror and realizing that person is completely Other, as though one's own characteristics become foreign.  These are people for whom I would gladly give my life but may also want to remove from the earth by less gracious means.  In so many ways, I am them and they are me, with some of the same characteristics from one parent and different characteristics from the other.  We lug around our family's history, the sins and blessings of our ancestors hung out like laundry to dry in the wind, never blowing away, but strewn about the yard in a beautiful colorful mess.  I am overcome by love for these people yet unable to tell them so.  Even in trying, I am dismissed with a wave of a hand, telling me they either understand or don't want to.  We are destined to wrestle like Jacob and Esau, blessed but never simultaneously.  I can't play it off like I don't care; the truth is revealed on my snot-covered sleeves.  Our lives intersect like the waves of sine and cosine.  At times, it is as though we form the same shadow, cut out of a fabric that one cannot perceive the stitches, the woof and the weft inseparable.  Perhaps my family is odd, forged out of hte fires of anger and love, one overflowing at one instant and the other the next.  There are moments of transcendent beauty and appalling shadow.  It attracts and repels, both in an instant, so that I can neither embrace it nor leave it behind.  And yes, perhaps my siblings will laugh and shake their heads at the melodrama, but it will be a knowing laughter and shaking of the head.  So I will do for them as well.

What does one do with the shadow side of one's fmaily?  Perhaps the same thing one does with faith and unbelief - love and hate, faith and unbelief - forming a Mobius strip in which one becomes trapped but does not really want to leave.  The shadows and demons lurking form the opposite side of love and familiarity.  Some families, I imagine - I fantasize - are able to keep their demons quiet.  Ours seem to immediately rattle their cages after having been feed.  We bring out the best and the worst in each other.  The damned part of it all is we're so aware of what is happening, confident in where the road is going, yet unable to sidestep the minefields along the way.  And so we prodigals limp together, pushing each other over and helping each other up, scraped and bruised, bloodied and broken, knowing that we can't really live with each other, but knowing all the more that we cannot live without each other.