They say that you can choose your
friends but you can’t choose your family.
They also say that blood is thicker than water. Both of those sayings are equally true.
The difference between friends
and family however is that you can break off a friendship, but the breakdown of
a relationship with a family member will take a little piece of your soul with
it. Grudges are held in the heart rather
than in the head and something you can forgive in a friend, hurts ten times
more when it’s family.
I have a sister. She is twelve years older than me and we
haven’t lived in the same house together since I was seven and she was
nineteen.
We have always had complicated
lives. A combination of a twelve year
age gap, misinformation, misconceptions and a lack of proper communication
between the both of us led to a fractured relationship.
Each thought the incorrect things
about the other and with each passing year, a wall was built between us that
was so thick and high that it was starting to resemble Fort Knox. Impenetrable.
The thing with families though is that with a friend you would have
abandoned the relationship long ago, but blood ties keep you in the
relationship because you “have to”, except you are both still hurting and it
gets worse all the time.
Why am I telling you this? Because that wall has been destroyed. It took twenty years to build it and a
conversation to demolish it. I’m telling
you because it might spur you on to fix what you thought was irretrievable too.
So what do you do? You start by honesty; brutal honesty. The kind of honesty that you can really only
have with your family. You each tell the
other what you don’t like about them, what you don’t understand and what hurts
the most. You hold nothing back. You each admit your faults. You discover that they are hurting just as
much as you are.
The good thing about families is
that you might sometimes be on different paths, far away from where you
started, but somewhere along that path is always a bridge that leads you back
to one another.
I have my big sister back and it
has made me so happy. The gap in my
heart I wouldn’t admit to is filled again.
Build those bridges! The gap between isn’t as far as you think xx
