More Siblings Doesn’t Always Mean More Sibling Support

Five siblings sounds like help, and people hear the number and do the math right there in front of you, six adults, so the appointments split six ways. Nobody has to take off work for it, and that isn't what happens. You take the first appointment because you live 20 minutes from the clinic, you take the follow-up because you're the one who heard what the doctor said the first time, and by the third nobody is dividing anything up, they're calling you for the update.

A big family makes it harder to explain why nobody is helping, since people hear six and want to know how so much of it ended up on one person. Somebody had to go first and nobody moved after that, and by the time it's obvious it's a pattern, the pattern is a year old and everyone else has planned around it.

"My siblings" sounds like one relationship, and what's actually there is five, with almost nothing in common between them. One sister calls on Sundays, a brother texts on birthdays, another sister's news comes secondhand through your mother. They all turn up to the same Christmas, which is the only place anyone sees them together.

Each one has its own history with you and that history decides what's available now. One sister drove four hours the week your marriage ended and let you stay through August, another repeated something you told her in confidence and it got back around within a week. You learn which sibling can be told what, and you keep that list for good.

You live closest, so you take the first appointment, then the follow-up, then the one after that, and within four months you know which pharmacy stocks the prescription and which entrance has the ramp. Six half-days of your own leave are gone before anyone has used the word schedule, and nobody assigned any of it to you, nobody is going to unassign it either.

Your siblings might have real limits, a brother with a newborn, a sister three states away whose job won't give her the days. Understanding the limits doesn't change who takes your mother to the appointment. Everyone else's constraints get treated as facts while your availability gets treated as a given, and five people ask how the appointment went and you still take the next one.

More involvement can make it worse. The sister who visits twice a year objects to the aide, says your mother would hate a stranger in the house, and doesn't offer to sleep there herself. A brother three states away insists your mother can stay in the house on her own. You explain every decision to four people and then do all of it yourself, and four of them have opinions about what you decide and none of them drive her anywhere.

Nobody revisits the old assignments. The child who could be relied on at 11 is the one still getting called at 43, and your family praises how capable you are without ever turning the praise into an afternoon somebody else covers. When you finally ask a sibling to take two appointments a month, they treat the request as a personality change, because you have never asked before.

Their childhoods don't match yours either. The oldest remembers the year the heat got shut off and a 5-year-old to feed after school, the youngest remembers parents with money and patience by the time she got to high school. Trouble starts when one of them uses her own childhood to decide what yours was like, and a sister who had the easier decade tells you you're remembering it wrong, or that your mother was never like that with anyone.

In a big family an argument between two people pulls in five more. You tell one sister why you're upset and find out four relatives already went over it on the phone. One of them asks you to come to the dinner anyway because your mother will be upset if you don't, another wants you to stop bringing it up because it ruins the day for everybody, and nothing gets said about what actually happened between the two of you.

Losing a sister often means losing her children too, the niece you drove to swim lessons for three years, the nephew whose graduation you hear about from a photo. Nobody decides on it, the invitations stop and nobody is making the calls anymore to keep it going.

Other relationships can continue, and a big family gives you more chances of it. You can be close to a brother while being estranged from a sister, and he can keep his own relationship with her without relaying anything in either direction, he doesn't bring her up at dinner and doesn't ask when the two of you are going to fix it.

You might miss the sister who remembers the house on Delaware Avenue and the dog you buried in the yard, even while you're glad about the brother who checks in every week. They're separate people, and being close to him doesn't replace the sister you lost.

When you're working out what help is actually available to you, count your siblings one at a time instead of as a group. A brother who won't discuss anything personal might show up with a truck every time you need one, the sister 2,000 miles away might be the one who calls back the same day and asks a follow-up question a week later, and another might be somebody you enjoy at a wedding and would never call late at night. None of that is a problem unless you're planning your year around him doing more. Asking each of them for what they've already proven they'll do gets you further than asking all of them for everything.

You can like having a big family and still be disappointed by how little of it shows up when something goes wrong. Two of them know you well, the other three don't know what your job is or how your year went. Both of those are ordinary in a family that size. When you need help you need somebody who answers and then does what they said they would, so go by which of them has actually done it.