Perhaps it was talking to someone about my grandparents the other day, which led to my opening up Ancestry.com again after so many months away. Looking at the many photos I have scanned and stored in iPhoto (the few that I scanned out of at least a dozen photo albums which are now gone, probably clogging up a landfill somewhere), made me sad. All that hard work doing the Ancestry research out of boxes of photos, clipping, letters, newspaper articles — now all gone. I’m grateful that I transcribed so many of the letters and copied the photos and organized as much as I did before the move and the loss of all my stuff. Without that, I’d literally have nothing left of it at all.

With all this, I couldn’t help but engage in much thought and brooding regarding the present state of my so-called family. How do I reconcile that going into the next phase of my life without my siblings?

I came to the conclusion that I must consider my parents ONLY as my family. The siblings are merely biologically related, that’s all. One set of parents, two families.

Now I just need to find a way to explain this to a total stranger — some way that sounds less emotionally damaged. (haha!)

It’s actually quite liberating to think of it that way. My parents had them, then my parents had me. Separate, but equal genetically if not socially. It’s grown out of the same notion that an adopted child might consider the people who raised them as their parents rather than the biological petrie dish parents who donated the DNA. In other words, there is more to family than mere genetics.

For me, it turns the situation on its head. None of this is my fault, really. How sad that my siblings could never accept me. They are missing out on SO much! They’ve lost so much by turning their backs on me. This was so reconciliatory that I wonder why I never considered it before?

For the better part of my life, I have worked VERY hard to make my relationship with the siblings work. It was HARD work. But as I was never part of their group, I was never admitted to their little club no matter how I tried. We are 100% blood-siblings, but we were raised a generation apart. You can’t correct for the fact that the three of them were raised in the fifties and sixties, then me in the seventies and eighties. Totally different.

From the beginning, they wanted nothing to do with me. By contrast, from the beginning, I was trained and expected to worship the ground my siblings walked on, forever in their shadows. Is there any wonder why I am stalled in such a state of confusion? Who am I if not the person constantly compared to them, trying to live up to their many accomplishments, or subject to suspicion and punishment based on their crimes. That is truly how I have ended up where I am today; tried and convicted for crimes I never committed, punished for someone else’s wrong-doings or simply because I am unable to meet an impossible standard.

So I did what I had to do, finally: I let the three of them go. In doing so, I feel at once unfettered and lonely. I was an only child, but not alone until now. On my mother’s deathbed, she admitted to me that she was terrified that I would irreparably break away from the others. She never wanted my sister and I to fight — it was a huge regret of hers that she’d cut off one of her sisters out of her life for many years. My mother wished to protect me from that same remorse by forcing me to be the one to apologize when my sister and I fought, though it wasn’t my fault. My sister never received the same advice. In the absence of being scolded and never being told to apologize no matter how severe the infraction, is it any wonder that sis developed into a person who values only her own self worth, at whatever price — even at the expense of my dignity?

Eventually, my spine hardened. I stopped putting up with the abuse. Much to my surprise, allowing the relationship to die off was easy. I just had to let go. There was no chase. No apologies. No grand gestures. Just silence. It was no more difficult to lose that bond with my sister than it would be to let go of a helium-filled balloon. Like that balloon, I watched our relationship quietly rise away from me, higher and higher, carelessly float away upon an invisible breeze, getting smaller and smaller until it was no more than a speck upon the skyline before it disappeared.

And I was free.

To mix my metaphors for a moment, for me, a family is like a house where you are welcome to come in without knocking — where you are safe, always welcome, with no questions asked. I used to have this old wooden sign hanging in my kitchen that read “Home Sweet Home — where you can scratch where it itches.” That’s all I ever really wanted; I hope I can find that again, this time, on my own terms.