Siblings, Gotta Love Them

I love my children.  They are beautiful, talented, highly imaginative, very opinionated and independent girls.  They are complete opposites in many ways and alike in others.  It’s all fuel for the sibling rivalry that crops up now and then and roars through a lot like a Texas tornado.  I hate it when they don’t get along.

 Have you ever stopped to wonder why God, in His infinite wisdom thinks it’s so funny (I’m convinced He does) to put such different people in the same family and under the same roof?  I have.  I have sat in wonder at how both girls are artistic, but draw so differently which reflects how differently they see things.  I have watched one try to force an opinion or viewpoint on the other and tempers flare because of the disagreement. 

 I personally think that God doesn’t do this paring up of people just for kicks.   I learned many valuable lessons from my brother growing up, though we are opposites in so many ways.  I learned that while I like piano music, I am not one to play it for hours and hours until I learn the song the way it’s supposed to be played.  I would gingerly practice a little every day and make some progress while he would hammer things out until it was perfect, which of course meant that the teachers loved him, not me. 

 From my brother I learned that some people can be pushed too hard and you’d either better be able to run fast, hide quick, or prepare to be pummeled.  I learned that if I kept him up all night telling scary stories that he would (while I wasn’t looking) roll the eyes back in my dolls so they looked white, put their arms out and fake vampire blood on their mouths and terrorize me in return. 

 From my brother I learned such skills as: anger management, organizational skills – to clean my half of the room first (before he could put all the stuff on my bed), and disaster training – had to get my miniatures out of the log cabins before Godzilla stomped my village. I also learned excellent spying skills including: eavesdropping, how to find secret stashes of the other people in the house, and how to un-wrap Christmas packages and re-wrap so no one knew.  I also learned how to negotiate chores for cash and that, in general, boys do not like dish cloths and would rather do yard work than dishes.

 My brother was also the one who taught me how to drive and while he cringed at the way I drove through Whataburger and stopped 20 times before getting up to the window, he never out right laughed at me.  I was thankful for that.   

 Because of my brother and an argument we had over whether Ms. Beasley could magically talk or was a robot of some kind, we now know for certain that she had a tape recorder hooked up to a string in her back because of a difficult surgery that left her forever sounding like a chipmunk, and with really bad stitches in her butt.

 My brother and I did not always get along; in fact, there were times we stayed pretty far away from each other.  One thing I have always known is that if there were some kind of trouble and I needed a defender, he would be there for me and I for him.  Siblings might fight each other in petty squabbles, but they don’t allow someone from the outside to step in and go after their brother or sister.

 My girls don’t always get along either, but God help the stupid people out there when someone tries to hurt one of them because the other one will quite literally go after them, hunt them down and make their life miserable. 

 All that being said, I think it is obvious that God puts different people in our lives so that we can learn from them, grow with them, love them, protect them, and to remind us that life should be handled with a sense of humor, a dash of tolerance and a load of patience.  I am thankful for my family mixture of personalities.

 Cherry Coley ©