Sibling Rivalry

[Doppelgang]

I was just wondering what other peoples experiences are regarding their brothers and sisters, or regarding being an ownely child, and how they think it has effected the person they have become.

In my case, I have a brother and two sisters, all older than me, and this I think has made me less of a responsible person than I may have been if I had had a younger brother or sister. (I remember always wanting to have a younger brother or sister when I was young) It also has effected me in other subtle ways I think, but it's difficult to put it into words.

I seem to have on/off periods of getting on with my brother and my sisters, but I think there's still always an underlying rivalry in the background. They have been helpful to me and good to me in so many ways, but they've also been pretty horrible to me at times, so I'm still unsure how to view my relationship to them.

So what experiences do other people have?

 

[msfantastico87]

I have 5 sisters and 3 brothers. I only really grew up with 3 of my sisters though. The youngest one was of course, the baby of the family. She would get anything and everything she wanted. She was a pest. For some reason though, I always protected her. She was so small and fragile. Now she's 18 and she is still the spoiled brat, but she respects me a lot more and looks up to me.

Another one of my sisters, she is two years younger than I, she was always a heavy set girl. I used to always make fun of her weight and she never cared. She never cared what anyone said about her and she was always a tough person. She always used to get me in trouble though. Anything she did wrong, she would pin it on me, and I ALWAYS got in trouble. Oh, and not to mention she would always mess with my stuff, misplacing things and always calling MY friends and trying to hang out with them >.< Now she's lost all this weight and she's a nicer person and we get along great.

My older sister, I only used to see during the summer but she never liked me. Like she used to cut me and stuff. For the most part, I hated her, and always wished bad things would happen to her lol

 

[WakingNightmare]

Well, I live with my two cousins but we're just like brother and sister. I get on best with Neil, he's eight, loves Buffy (the bits I let him watch anyway... no way he's going near S6!) and he's really sweet. I'm actually bummed out that he's gonna grow up one day 🙁

Courtney... she's about six months younger than me and we get on not so well. I'm actually really annoyed with her right now 😡

I sometimes think my family would fit right in on a CBS sitcom...

 

[xfivebyfive]

I have an older sister and a younger brother. But growing up it was just me and my brother. My sister is 18 years older then me so she was full grown and out of the house. She was around when I was really little but then decided to stop speaking to my father so I didn't see her for like 10 years. I still only see her like once every 5 years or so. I don't really care about her. She's really only my sister by blood.

My younger brother and I either get along really well or hate eachothers guts. It's very extreme. I've always been very protective of him because he has autism. Now that he's older and very high functioning you can't even tell so he hates me being over protective. We have a very strained relationship now cause of our father. But I love him.

 

[BananaBuffy]

I have one sister, just one and she's on this site although not quite as active as she'd like to be due to the fact that she doesn't have her own laptop. Her name is Tiffany-Ella and she is my best friend. I was blessed with a sister that I was this close with. She actually hangs out with me at school, it's shocking but awesome at the same time. She gets on with most of my friends these days and loves Buffy. Although sometimes I feel bad for letting her go near the later seasons, I'm not sure how my Mum would react if she knew what I was letting my 13 year old sister watch. My parents are over protective.

I tell her most things, and we do fight but we make up pretty quickly. My friends and people I know always marvel at how close we are, they find it weird. It's funny when we get into Angel vs. Spike debates but we both agree that Spuffy wins out over Bangel. Yeah, she doesn't like Bangel...I've taught her well.

So, yeah. That's my sibling experience.

 

[NY State of Mind]

Well i have 3 sisters and 4 brothers....they usually follow me and definitely respect me...so no rivalry but its cause I'm the big brother basically. As for them...they usually fight over petty things lol

 

[Username]

I am the youngest of four children, I get along well with my oldest brother and my sister, they're great.... but my other brother, he's a jerk. I've never liked him, we were fighting all the time about everything when we were younger, he used to hold me down and breathe on my face ugh! he's 5 years older than me so I never stood a chance against him. I did a drawing once of him being stabbed by knives and there was fire and blood, and then my dad saw it cried cos you don't draw stuff like that about your family! he's a very sensitive man..

 

[prophecygrrl]

I have one brother who's older than me by three years. Right now, we have the weirdest relationship. We basically just acknowledge each other, but other than that, we don't talk at all. And it's pretty much always been this way, when we weren't actively hating each other at least. As we've gotten older, we've developed really similar interests independently of each other...like same favorite music, same favorite movies and directors, books, similar politics, stuff like that. It's really odd, because when I say we don't talk, I seriously mean that we don't talk. at all. 😛

I think he was always jealous of me because my parents showed more affection towards me since I was the youngest (and I was such a brat, though I still kind of am 😛). And partly because of that, he's never been able to have the best relationship with my parents. Resenting me turned into resenting my parents as well. At the same time, I think I always wanted to impress him? I dunno. It's so weird...my family needs some intensive therapy or something to sort out our sibling problems, lmao. 😀 Now that he's in college and I'm at home, things are a bit better, I guess. We still aren't close at all, but at least we don't, like, hate each other anymore. 😀

 

[Doppelgang]

My younger brother and I either get along really well or hate eachothers guts. It's very extreme. I've always been very protective of him because he has autism. Now that he's older and very high functioning you can't even tell so he hates me being over protective. We have a very strained relationship now cause of our father. But I love him.

Thats nice that you have a good relationship overall with your brother. I often go to opposite extremes like that with my sister who's 4 years older than me, we sometimes get on really well, like we sometimes go to the cinema together or watch a film together, but then sometimes there's a real competition between us for the affection of other family members, and recently we lived together for awhile but it didn't work out too well. There's still a closeness between us I think, but we're just quite different people so we clashed a bit when living together. 🙂 For starters she's not a Buffy fan, she's into sex and the city and desperate housewives, which are just not my cup of tea 😀

 

[MandaMeena]

I have one sister and she's 7 years older than me. It was harder for us to get along when we were younger because she always had to watch me since we were living with our single mother. I don't think she liked that very much. Plus, I'll admit, I could be a pain. But now, we get along really really well! It's kinda nice now that we're in a place that we can talk to each other about what's going on in our lives. I'm very grateful to have her as a sister, and I love her very much. 🙂

 

[zobothehobo]

I have two sisters. One is 11 months younger than me and the other is 2 and a half years younger than me. The one who's 11 months younger than me was always the perfect one. Good freaking lord she got SO much praise and attention when I was younger... there are more pictures of her at my first birthday than of me. She was a few weeks old and I had been there for a year. Even if I was better than her at something, I didn't get praise... like piano. When we started, I was SO much better than her. She knew it, I knew it, my family knew it, our piano teacher said it... it was just known and accepted I was better than her. But all I heard was "oh Maya's just getting into it late... when she gets in the swing of things, then she'l shine." Then she did...and I got sad and depressed that even if I was good no one cared about me so I stopped trying and she passed me and everyone said "See? I told you! Maya just needed to get in the swing of it! We're so proud of her!!!" This was a general pattern throughout the years. Very depressing and upsetting... I kinda don't care anymore, and neither does she... but growing up, it was AWFUL.

The other sister... Well she's the baby. I don't even have words about Xena. God. She gets everything, even when she's wrong. And my parents don't have the balls to punish her or parent her AT ****ING ALL! So then I step in to do it and she hates me because I "play the parent." But if I don't do it, no one will. AND SHE ADMITS THAT! I've tried to just be her sister, but I can't. I need to be her parent... she needs at least SOME parenting. She's 15 and she has no one.

 

[Seeing Red]

I have a younger sister who is 20 months younger then me. Perfect blonde hair, blue eyes and is Daddy's little girl. He always thinks she is right even when she is wronge everything she does is prefect. She is also jelous of me because I am taller and my eyes change color, also she always wants to weigh less then me. Even though I am older then her and do weigh more then her by a few pounds she makes fun of me. We get along great at times, joking around having fun just being best friends. Then BOOM fighting and more fighting.

 

[brinkster130]

I have three sisters, one older and two younger. My older sister is sixteen years older than me so she is more like a aunt than a sister to me. My younger sisters and I get along pretty well. We are all three very different so we are never really competing with each other. The three of us argue sometimes, but for the most part we get along; although we do make fun of each other a lot...but thats all done in a loving way.😛

We have "sister dates" once a month where the three of us go do something together....this month they are skipping school for a day and we are going to Disneyland 😀

I guess my sisters and I are lucky that despite our many flaws and differences we get along well. Well, us younger three that is...

 

[Abbeycat]

I have younger step siblings and sibling who are at least 5 years younger than me. I use to have such a hard time getting along with them because they liked to push my buttons and make me mad. They kept trying to test me. But now for the most part, I get along with my sister and my two younger stepbrothers.

 

[Misty]

I have one older sister who is 2 1/2 years older than me. We're close and we hang out alot because we both love alot of the same stuff. But we also argue alot because we both annoy eachother lol. But I am glad that I do have a sister because I couldn't even imagine what it would be like to be an only child.

 

[Willow My Love]

I have a twin brother, an older brother, an I sort-of have a sister. (Her dad married my mom when she was 2. She doesn't remember not knowing me.)

My twin and I get along famously. There really aren't secrets in our relationship. We talk, if not every day, every other day, about the stupid little things that were important in the moment. It sucks that he lives in California, and I'm in Ohio, but he's happy there. I can feel it. We have this amazing connection. I can't describe it to someone who's not a twin. We're incredibly close, and Joe is one of the most encouraging people I've ever known. He's really a bright spot in my life.

Then there's my older brother... He's been harsh with me my whole life. Nothing I ever did was good enough. I know he was trying to push me, but he did it in a horrible way. He's always on me about something. I'm not married, but I live with my person. My job isn't good enough, I'm not in school atm, I haven't lost enough weight yet. I'm never satisfactory to him. I'm never good enough. James and I never talk. He'll call me with questions about Mom or Gramma, but we don't actually talk. Don't get me wrong, I love my brother, but we're just not close.

My little sister and I have a much better relationship now than we did. She used to annoy me like Dawn does, only I hate Dawn. I love Amira. She's turned out to be this awesome person, and I'm very proud of who she is, because I was so worried for her. I saw her heading down the same path I did at her age, but she switched course before she did the things I did. I'm glad she didn't go through all that I did. She's become a much better person than I was at her age. (She's 4 years younger than me.) When I was 20, I saw her doing the same things I did at 16. I only mentioned to her once how I felt. I don't like to harp on people. And she really took my words to heart.

Being the "youngest" (my twin is LESS THAN a minute older than me. C-Section) in my technical family made me feel like I would never be as good as the boys. James and Joe were people I looked up to, but would never be.
Having Amira around made me feel like I should be a role model. I'll admit, most of the time I wasn't, and though I know she did, I wish she hadn't looked up to me as much sometimes.
Being a twin really isn't something I can describe if you're not one. I can't describe it fully. You'll get the jist, but you can't know... It's like having another half to you. I don't mean like a best friend, or a significant other kind of other half, I mean a legit other half to you. You two together are one person. And even trying to describe it, the voice in my head is like, "NO! That's wrong!" I guess I can't describe it because I'm been a twin my whole life, so I don't know what it's like not to be one. You literally share everything with this person beginning with birth. It's an amazing connection to have with someone.

Being the only girl (Amira was only around every other weekend) made me really have to fight to get anything. There were two boys, so I was always outvoted on what we did, where we went, all of that. I became this huge tomboy. I'm not anymore, but I just got out of that a few years ago... I didn't really learn anything about makeup until I was 19. No one showed me how to use it. No one showed me how to style my hair, or how to dress. My mom was a single mother, so she worked all the time, and I don't blame her. I took cues from my brothers. I learned how to do eyeliner from a co-worker when I was 17.
My brothers also liked to use me as a punching bag, which, added with how James always put me down, gave me awful self-esteem issues I still have. I couldn't wear short sleeve shirts because I had bruises all up my arms. So, I don't like shirts with sleeves much higher than my elbows. I usually put a long sleeve shirt under them.

So that's what having siblings did to/for me. 🙂

 

[Taake]

I seem to have on/off periods of getting on with my brother and my sisters, but I think there's still always an underlying rivalry in the background. They have been helpful to me and good to me in so many ways, but they've also been pretty horrible to me at times, so I'm still unsure how to view my relationship to them.

So what experiences do other people have?

Well I have a very complex family background and though I have siblings I have not really grown up with them, not evenly anyway (I've got three sisters, two brothers - I'm 'the baby') and though I would say that we certainly have on/off periods this for us is not so much based on any rivalry. It's simply that we love each other... but we don't necessarily like each other 🙂

We're so diffrent and sometimes that's hard to overlook.
As for being a kid with siblings I find it was very beneficial to me as a person because you learn to share and you have that special "us against the world" mentality one often develops (like we'll fight amongst ourselves but if some outside butts in it's like, don't mess with my sister!!)

As for responsibility I'm more responsible than the lot of them put together but I credit that to the years we spent apart and without much contact at all and different experiences being had then (ca ages 9-17 for me)

And though, as a kid, I would happily have been an only child I now wouldn't trade my sibs for anything in the world. They're the best I've got 😀

 

[zobothehobo]

I will say this, my siblings and I have had and do have A LOT of problems. My sisters are TERRIBLE to me and I'm TERRIBLE to them at times... But I wouldn't want to be an only child. I have no idea how only children do it... I mean now it wouldn't suck that much to be an only child... but growing up... My god that would have been terrible. My sisters and I made up these fantastical worlds with complex rules and guidelines... Maya wrote plays and I was always the lead... Maya was a painter... she painted portraits of Xena and I. We played our instruments together... we watched movies we ordinarily wouldn't but our sisters wanted to that we ended up loving. I can't even imagine my life growing up without sisters... all the fun we had. Not having someone to play dress up with... or a board game, or cards... or anything. That sounds dull and terrible. No offense to any only children here, but I'm so glad my parents had kids after me... even if my sisters and I have some big problems between us.