Sisters Who Grew Up in Different Houses

Two women can share a father and have almost nothing in common in their memories of him. One of them lived with him and the other saw him every other weekend, or they met at 30 because a second marriage put two sets of grown children at the same table. The word sister suggests a childhood spent together, and sometimes there wasn't one.

Half-siblings and step-siblings end up estranged more often than full siblings do, and the reason is ordinary enough. They didn't live in the same house. Most of what makes two people close gets built during unremarkable time together, arguing over the bathroom, knowing which friends are allowed over, being there on the days nobody photographed. Two sisters who met at Christmas can like each other fine and still have none of that behind them.

They also might be remembering two different men. One sister remembers a father who coached her team and showed up at the school concerts. The other remembers waiting by the window on a Saturday for a car that never turned into the driveway. Both of them are describing the same man accurately.

Conversations get difficult because one woman's good memories sound like she's correcting the other. The sister who lived with him describes somebody generous and dependable, and her half-sister can't match that to anyone she's met. It works the same way in reverse, and the daughter who did the waiting describes a man who let her down over and over while her sister hears an accusation about a father she loved.

The differences get concrete when money comes into it. One daughter's tuition got paid and the other's didn't, and both of them have always known which one was which. He dies and the house goes to the daughter who was living in it. Or the will splits everything four ways, and the daughter who drove him to dialysis for two years has to be gracious about that. Somebody fronts the funeral money and gets paid back, or doesn't, and the two of them have known each other 11 months.

A parent who's pleased his daughters are finally meeting expects the relationship to take. He counts the wanting as the relationship itself, and he says so at dinner, and both women nod because the alternative is a scene. Nobody in the family has any reason to look at how much time the two of them have actually spent together, which is a few afternoons and a wedding.

There's often competition for the shared parent's attention, especially when one daughter got much more of it. The one who got less can resent what the other received, and the resentment can be specific, he covered her rent through her twenties and never offered. Her half-sister can feel blamed for a childhood she didn't pick and couldn't have changed at 9.

Step-sibling relationships have another difficulty, because the family itself might be four years old. Two parents marry and expect their children to think of each other as brother and sister before the children have had a single conversation on their own. Some of them do become close, and stay close for decades. Others turn out to be people who shared a bathroom for a while and a Christmas card list afterward.

Age does its own damage. If her half-sister is 20 years older, the two of them might never have lived in the same house at all, and they grew up in different decades of the same family. They share a father, a last name, and a set of relatives. People still ask why they aren't closer, usually without counting the years.

Estrangement in these relationships often looks like nothing at all. Contact fades after the shared parent dies, because he was the reason there was contact. A step-sibling relationship can end at a divorce, the house gets sold, and neither of them has any occasion to call the other. Nobody decides on it, the phone just stops.

She can still grieve a half-sister she met at 28. The relationship might have started late and been built out of restaurant lunches and text messages, and losing it is real grief. Adult relationships get made the same way childhood ones do, out of accumulated time, and 12 years of lunches is accumulated time.

When you're trying to work out why you and your half-sister keep missing each other, start with the arithmetic instead of the label. Count the years the two of you actually lived under the same roof, and count the years each of you had with the parent you share. Ask her what he was like on a weeknight when she was 14, and expect an answer that doesn't match yours. Knowing where the gap came from makes the relationship easier than pretending there isn't one.

You can be sisters and remember two different men. Both of you are describing him accurately, and neither of you has to give up the description to stay in contact with the other. What the two of you have is a father, a last name, and however many years you've actually spent together, and the last number is the one that decides how close you get to be.