My brother Miles laid in an intensive care unit inside a trauma hospital in Reno. He had hit a tree while chasing me on skis down Mammoth Mountain, California, and now, his brain was swelling dangerously inside his skull.
Meanwhile, my sister, Erin, was pregnant with her first son, 7,200 miles away on the South Island of New Zealand. She couldn’t fly with the baby on the way, so I sat by my brother’s bedside alone and waited for him to live or die.
I was 24 years old at the time, and I remember thinking: My sister is about to usher in a new life and my brother is inviting death to dance, and they’re on opposite ends of the globe. I am stuck in the middle — and there’s not a thing I can do to help either of them. I love my brother and sister on a deeply cellular level, but I hated being in that position.
Turns out, our siblings are the easiest people in our lives to love and despise all at once. They are simultaneously irritating, tiresome and impossible to be around, while also being the people on the planet who most closely resemble us. They know us better than we know ourselves and always manage to say or do the one thing that gets under our skin the most. Still, we have no choice but to love them unconditionally, maybe because we know they can’t bail on us like everyone else.
Siblings, as we know, are the ones we’re stuck with the longest. Parents, spouses, friends, cousins, children: They see but a fraction of our lives. But your sister? Your brother? If we’re lucky, they’re here for the long haul. From cradle to grave, that’s the person who’s seen you at your worst and still pulls up a chair next to you at the dinner table.
My brother lived. Not long after, I got on a flight to New Zealand and stood at my sister’s bedside in a birthing center, where I watched, in awe with tears streaming down my cheeks, as she brought her son into the world.
Research on siblings
Those who reported positive relationships with their siblings and low levels of sibling conflict were less likely to struggle with loneliness, depression and anxiety.
Siblings are ubiquitous — 80% of Americans have one. Yet research on siblings tends to be a bit overlooked. Only 3% of studies on close personal relationships focus on siblings.
What research does exist on sibling relations shows us one important thing: Siblings matter more than we realize. Our dynamic with them shapes who we are, how we perceive ourselves and our outlook on the world.
Most of the research conducted has focused on how siblings shape us when we’re adolescents, when we begin to learn good and bad habits from those close to us.
For example, younger siblings are more likely to engage in substance abuse behaviors if their older siblings drink or do drugs. But some of these influences can last well into adulthood. A 2019 study of people in their 60s found that those who reported positive relationships with their siblings and low levels of sibling conflict were less likely to struggle with loneliness, depression and anxiety. Bottom line: Get along well with your sibling and you’ll be happier later in life.
Family story
Miles is six years older than me. When I was a kid, I called him Mino. He and my sister would roll me up in a rug, strap it closed with a belt and leave me, like an imprisoned burrito on the floor. I didn’t mind; I liked the attention.
Erin, my sister, is four years older than me. When she’d have birthday parties in middle school, I was so desperate to be invited that I would dress up like a fancy waiter in a black and white outfit and serve her and her friends drinks and finger foods on a tray. I am the runt in the family and all I longed for was to be included. To be a part of something greater than myself.
Before me, there was Macey, the sister I never knew. Macey died a couple of months after she was born, of SIDS, which is what they called it in the ’80s when babies stopped breathing in their cribs. Rainbow babies are what they called it when you had another baby to attempt to replace the one who died. You can ask my mother, but having another kid never fills the hollow left in your heart when you lose a child. That hole is still there, four decades later.
But still, they had me, the second-third child. Like an asterisk on the family tree. But I was loved fiercely. My mom treated me like I was the lucky lottery card.
The first few years, my siblings and I were a team, us against the elements. My parents would take us into the mountains, skiing, hiking and on overnight river trips, where we’d roll our sleeping bags onto the sand — me sandwiched between my older siblings — and sleep to the sound of a gushing river.
While skiing, I’d chase my brother and sister in a flying snowplow down our favorite run, Hot Wheels Gully. Miles launched off jumps, and then there was me, his constant shadow. It was an idyllic, wild childhood. But then, one day, when I was four years old, the team I’d tried so hard to be a part of got divided.
Bottom line: Get along well with your sibling and you’ll be happier later in life.
My parents got a divorce. At first, the three of us kids went to live with my mom, three hours away from the house my parents had built together, where my dad still lives all these years later. But Miles didn’t get along with my mom’s new boyfriend, who entered the picture and became our stepdad. So not long after, Miles moved back in with my dad.
The fracture between the three of us siblings grew as the chasm between my parents did, too.
At home at my mom’s house, I craved my sister’s attention and a sense of belonging: I would sneakily read her diary and steal her clothes, anything to get her to notice me. At my dad’s house, I dug a peephole in the wall between my brother’s room and my own so I could spy on what he was doing. I felt like I barely knew my brother anymore. We’d get together for weekends and holidays, but he was essentially a middle school-aged stranger, living under a faraway roof.
My mom’s method for getting the three of us kids back together was to throw us in a raft. So, we did a two-week Grand Canyon river trip when I was 12.
When a scorpion crawled into my sleeping bag at night, it was Miles who fished it out for me. When I was scared to poop into the groover, it was Erin who told me it would be OK. And when things got really scary, like when our stepdad flew into his abusive rages, it was both of them who I ran to for safety. All of which is to say, even when our siblings feel like aliens, they are the people who have your back.
Why siblings matter
I called up an expert in sibling dynamics because I was curious about what we know, as a society, about the way siblings work. How does our behavior with our closest relatives define us? Should I work harder to keep my siblings close?
Shawn Whiteman is an associate professor at Utah State University’s Department of Human Development and Family Studies, where the main focus of his academic research is on siblings.
The closest sibling relationships, Whiteman tells me, are sister-sister dynamics. Girls are traditionally taught to be more emotionally expressive, apparently. Brother-brother duos tend to be more expressive through shared hobbies and physical activities.
Those are just stereotypes, of course. In my family, my sister and I were — and still are — closer than my brother and I are, but that’s mostly due to proximity. She and I grew up under the same roof and we live an hour away from each other now.
When I was nine months pregnant with my son, she was the one I called to say, “Is this what happens when your water breaks?” She and I both appreciate long walks in the woods and a night spent under the stars. When I lost friends in an avalanche, she would send me handmade cards in the mail with notes that said: Thinking of you.
My brother, on the other hand, lives in a different part of the state and, of course, he grew up in a different house. It’s like we speak different languages. I go for long runs to deal with stress; he stays up all night on the computer. I love to travel; he only recently got a passport. I shop at the farmers market with canvas totes; he buys 12 cups of Starbucks coffee a day, each time using a throwaway cup. (My attempts to gift him reusable mugs have proven useless.) Our values are intrinsically different. But I’ve come to realize that’s OK. We don’t have to have the same values in order to have a close relationship. Our siblings can remind us who we are, and who we’re not.
“Siblings provide us with a constant source of comparison for us to evaluate our accomplishments, our attributes, our qualities against,” Whiteman says. “At times, your sibling can show you things you want to aspire to be, or ways you want to be different. Siblings can both inspire us to move in different directions and also show us ways that we want to be different from them.”
Even when our siblings feel like aliens, they are the people who have your back.
When Miles graduated from high school and went off to college, he became the ultimate recluse. Months would pass without any word from him. Throughout his 20s, he skipped holidays and family functions altogether.
Once, my mom sent me on a mission to drive hours to his apartment just to knock on his door and make sure he was still in there. (He was, enmeshed in a computer programming job and surrounded by piles of takeout boxes.)
It would take that skiing accident and his resulting traumatic brain injury when he was 30 years old for him to reintegrate into the family. I had spent years wanting my big brother back — and suddenly, there he was, and he needed me to help him use the bedpan.
As he rehabilitated from his brain injury, my mom and I cared for him for many months. It wasn’t pretty, but it felt nice to be a part of his life again.
During his early recovery, he had a tracheotomy and couldn’t speak, but he would write simple messages to me on a whiteboard, like “hi” or “TV.” When he was out of it, I would rub his feet as he lay in bed, as the nurses said that could help relax him. Many months later, he wrote me a note that said, “Thank you for the foot massages.” I honestly didn’t know if he even knew I was doing that.
After the accident, he stayed closer to all of us. Uncle Mino, as my kids call him now, shows up for Halloween in the goofiest costume and he’s always first in line for roller coasters and ice cream. He’s the fun uncle.
My sister and her family moved back home from New Zealand and I got to watch from the sidelines as my two nephews grew up, exploring the mountains just like we did. Our family, once divided by death and divorce and distance, is a unit again. We don’t always get along, of course, but we get each other.
Whiteman says it’s never too late to reestablish a stronger relationship with your sibling, even if conflict has gotten in the way in the past.
“Sibling relationships are important throughout our lives. They can be sources of support and also sources of conflict,” he says. “But there are always opportunities to renegotiate challenges. It often takes some change in the family system for those challenges to be brought up. Something has to happen for you to go back and look at the conflict and make it better.”
No relationship with a sibling is free of strife. I watch my own kids — now eight and 10 — as they brawl it out with each other on a daily basis. Someday, they’ll appreciate each other, I hope. I know I do.
Just knowing there’s a person out there who I can call who’s seen the entire trajectory of my life from day one is a special sort of comfort. It’s an ally you don’t always know you need. But one who, hopefully, shows up when you need them. Miles and Erin, if you’re reading this, I wouldn’t be who I am without you two. I am forever grateful to be your little sister. But never roll me up in a rug again.
This story appears in the January/February 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.