Today’s guest post is from Brother Sky.
Recently, I’ve been reflecting on a trend I’ve noticed in middle-aged Mormons (40s/50s) that I know (I reside within that age demographic and so am friends with more of these folks than the younger singles/marrieds or the elderly). When we have conversations about family, specifically siblings, I’ve found that a majority of the LDS folks I talk to in this age range don’t feel particularly close to their siblings. I also noticed this trend when I was single for a while in my forties. Many of the women I dated mentioned not being close to their siblings, not talking to them regularly, not living near them and not particularly missing them.
The people I know/dated is an extremely small sample size, so I’m not going to make an argument about trends, etc. What I am interested in is how Mormons think about the eternal family and what they think about when they hear that phrase. In my experience, the eternal family is usually spoken/thought of (here, for instance) as a kind of linear, generational unit that descends from Adam and Eve and is connected to, finally, all other families, meaning that the entire human family is sealed together.
Often, though, when we discuss family at church, we focus on (quite reasonably, IMO) the so-called nuclear family: Men are encouraged to be good fathers and women good mothers, children should be taught to be good, upstanding people who make appropriate moral choices. Notwithstanding the problematic rhetoric surrounding LDS views of gender roles, what I don’t hear a lot about is how we should treat our siblings, unless it’s in the context of teaching our young children how to get along with/not beat up on their own brothers and sisters. I rarely hear talk about how to maintain family ties with grown siblings; siblings who may have left the church, moved away, whatever.
Again, a fair amount of the people I’ve talked to about this who are about my age seem to have experienced a kind of benign and perhaps to-be-expected distance as they and their siblings grew up and each got started on their own paths towards adulthood. We have all, to a greater or lesser degree, experienced this movement outward from the primary family, but the kind of distance, emotional and otherwise, that it often appears to increase between siblings leads me to a few questions:
- How important is it to you to maintain close emotional ties between you and your grown siblings?
- If you’re not close to your grown siblings, how do the teachings of the temple about sealings/eternal families affect you? Do you find such teachings painful? Hopeful? Healing?
- If you are a parent, did you try to cultivate a closeness among your children with the hope that they’d remain close in the years to come? Was that an important parental goal?
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
This surprises me because I and my husband (both the oldest of six, in our forties) are very close to our siblings, even though many of them live far away. Since mine all live in different states, I speak on the phone to my three brothers weekly, my two sisters almost daily (we also have a weekly sisters conference call and just returned from a sisters weekend retreat together). We have private family Facebook groups, email groups, group chats, and instagram feeds that keep us connected as well. My husband isn’t as good at phoning, but since most of his siblings live nearby we see them every other week or so. Annual family reunions are a good way to connect, and I fully expect my four kids to be good friends as they age. Two of them are away at college and they snapchat the younger teens, and they Facetime frequently. So yes, this is vital to me. I’d say my siblings are my best friends, even more so than when we were growing up.
I continue to be surprised how my family turned out (I’m in the 40-50s range you mention). My sibs and I were so close in our youth/teens/20s that I thought we’d always be great friends. I have one sibling I’m close to now, probably because we are the most alike. The rest I could live without. Two of my siblings can’t even be in the same room together without arguing (and both are great people, but they see the world in diametrically opposed ways). Two other siblings have such messed up lives that contact with them is generally about solving their problems. Another sibling left the family years ago and wants no contact, but calls occasionally.
I feel a deep sense of responsibility for all of my siblings, but am grateful I live far enough away from them all that contact is limited. We are all very close with our parents though.
I also find this interested because I read an article just a few years ago that said it was one of the most important relationships in your life: they know you the longest and are typically raised under similar circumstances. Marriages happen once you are an adult, and your parents usually die before you get older. Siblings are with you from beginning to end.
Having said that, I think the hard “nuclear” family lines are going to disappear. We are all siblings and all God’s children. My personal opinion is that once we are all dead, and the veil lifted, we will all remember and know each other.
I’m pretty close with my siblings, but I don’t necessarily talk to them weekly, In fact, compared to my wife’s family, we don’t get together at all. My wife gets together at her mother’s house every Sunday night. We can go a year without getting together with everyone of my siblings, but mine are much more spread out: (Denver, St. George, Utah, Davis, and Weber Counties.) I do get together with my close siblings but not every month. (We’ve tried, but schedules don’t work out very well.) My sister travels from Denver 1-2 times per year, and when I’m in Denver, I try to visit when I can.
My dad, on the other hand, has a poor relationship with his siblings. An estranged sister called and told him she had cancer. She died and he made no effort to go to her funeral. My mother has a much better relationship with her siblings, but has gone years without seeing them.
It’s important to me to maintain close emotional ties between me and my siblings because I love them and enjoy (most of the time) being around them. We have our tiffs, but generally, I’d be very sad if I didn’t have a relationship with them.
I’ve never thought of my parents’ sealing as binding siblings together. I’ve always believed that I was sealed to my parents, and through them I was sealed to God, but since I got married, I see it more as being sealed to my wife and to God; that my connection to my parents isn’t necessary any more because of my sealing to my spouse and to God. There’s nowhere for siblings in my current view of sealings. It doesn’t make me sad that I don’t think that I’m sealed to my siblings because I figure eternity is a whole hell of a lot of time. Just because we’re not sealed together doesn’t mean we can’t all get together and hang out in heaven.
I only have a one-year-old right now, but if and when more children join our family, I want to cultivate closeness because I think siblings really help us learn how to function in the world. We love our parents and siblings first, so that love will probably be a model for how we love our non-immediate brothers and sisters.
“Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Robert Frost. That’s kind of how I feel about siblings. They are the only ones who understand the quirkiness of the home you grew up in. They are the only ones to understand certain shorthand conversations. But there’s a definite randomness to siblings. I find we are all very very different in how we live our lives. And yet, as someone above pointed out, when I think of my own kids, they will be siblings after we are long dead, and I hope they are still friends.
My initial thought is heck yeah, siblings are for eternity. God’s eternal family isn’t a chain, it’s a web of interconnected people bound by love and covenant. And siblinghood is definitely eternal. We were siblings in pre-mortal life and most of us are siblings here and siblinghood (children of common parents) will exist in the life to come. Feeling a distance from siblings in the middle years is quite common (there’s a lot of sociology about this), but if the relationships remain functional, in people’s later years they often circle back to siblings. Children grow up and leave, parents die, spouses die or leave, but siblings ride the tides of life with you.
I have a plethora of siblings. They range from best friends to avoid at all costs. We were raised in a dysfunctional Mormon family, and we are now [forced to] choose to cooperate as we care for our aging parent. Blood bonds are an amazingly strong thing, and at the same time, fragile. I have no wisdom to offer, except that people will ever surprise you, both for good and ill.
My husband (who is in his forties and not particularly close to his siblings, in case you were wondering) was the first one to propose to me the idea that we aren’t REALLY sealed to our siblings – or even to our children. His theory is that the only one we will REALLY be with forever is our spouse, so if you aren’t married I guess it sucks to be you.
I, on the other hand, love my siblings more than life itself. My parents despaired since we fought like cats and dogs growing up (neither parent had much experience with sibling conflict, so they saw it as being much worse than it really was, I think) but we all get along now. One of my main goals as a parent is for my kids to grow up into adults who willingly spend time with each other, but I don’t think you can force it – has to happen organically.
It’s really important to me as a parent that my kids have supportive relationships with one another especially as we have a long-term sick adult daughter. Growing up with a sick sibling is a great way to learn that random stuff can happen to anyone and that it’s the job of the strong to help the weak. I lost my only sister when she was in her early twenties, so I have a keen sense of how a sibling is the only person who can come close to understanding where you were from.
I’m about to make this official in drawing up a will that will favour her long-term care, which feels very scary indeed as I would never want to plant contention between them, so I also intend to let them each know what we are doing and why, so hopefully they will have time to bitch and holler at us rather than at each other. I do feel we have a particular duty to our siblings and that I am my brother’s keeper, and that this relationship is a model for our relating in the eternities, but it’s an aspiration impossible to realise alone. Everyone has to choose to play to make it work.
Really interesting to see other’s experience.
Everyone: Thanks for your thoughtful and interesting comments.
anitawells: Yes, I actually found it surprising, too, which is why I wanted to write a post about it. I’d always assumed (perhaps wrongly) that maintaing close family ties (even with extended family) was an almost automatic function of being a Mormon. The comment by MDearest highlights the problematics of family dynamics. I’m not close to my one sibling, as she’s firmly in the “avoid at all costs” camp, but I’m also interested in how the LDS familial mandate affects how we deal with difficult/challenging family members.
handlewithcare: I love this: “it’s an aspiration impossible to realize alone.” That’s the key, I think. And in less functional families, so much of what can cause things to fall apart happens when people withdraw into themselves in order to survive particularly stressful situations, which means the aspiration of togetherness is put immediately at risk.
Joni: Your husband’s idea about sealing is really interesting. Would you be willing to share how he came to have that idea? And for anyone else out there, do you recall any church lesson or talk that specifically mentioned sealings to siblings?