Half a Sibling?
Redefining the Way We Classify Family

Illustration by Reuben Buchanan| VOX Staff

By Lauren McEwen
VOX Staff

When I was in sixth grade, my health teacher drilled into me and my classmates’ heads that the standard nuclear family consists of Mommy, Daddy, Jimmy, Sally and their little dog Rover. With both of my parents having been previously married, I was born into a blended family of three half sisters, two half brothers and a huge number of people I just call family to make introducing them a little easier.

We’re not the only family who doesn’t fit the stereotype of a nuclear family. The National Stepfamily Resource Center Web site reports that “one in three Americans is now a stepparent, a stepchild, a stepsibling, or some other member of a stepfamily,” showing that the blended family is becoming more common. Having a lot of relatives can be confusing, but we are still family. Blood is the only thing that matters and half or whole, I love all five of my siblings equally.

Textbook Definition
In the so-called standard family there are no half siblings, so what I was being taught in health class bothered me. No one had ever defined the make-up of a family to me in the past. I just grew up believing that everyone had heaps of relatives whose branch on the family tree was a little hard to place. But after learning about the nuclear family, I began to wonder why my type of family wasn’t seen as acceptable. I wondered if I would grow up and spend countless hours on a therapist’s couch. Maybe my health book is right, I thought.

Learning from textbooks that the structure of my family was considered less than normal offended me. Textbooks show blended families as broken, dysfunctional and unnatural — just because they don’t fit into the neat little cookie-cutter design of families from the ‘50s, with an apron-clad mom in the kitchen, rushing to make dinner for her hubby and ever-obedient kids. As a result, many blended families use stiff distinctions to refer to non-standard parts of the family, with words like stepsiblings, stepparents and worst of all, half siblings. The mere existence of the word half sibling forces us to classify our relationship as something false or unnatural so it dilutes the meaning of family. I don’t see how a family as warm and full of laughter as mine can be stereotyped as broken and dysfunctional simply because we don’t fit the textbook definition of what a normal family should be.

Too Many Branches on the Family Tree
Over the years I learned to blur the truth to simplify things by dubbing a number of really extended family members as cousins to save myself the headache of explaining each relationship. How else could I tell my cousin, the daughter of my mother’s first husband’s daughter from his second marriage, that she is really my niece? In her 7-year-old eyes, aunties are grown-ups and I’m far from grown. Cousin just rolls off the tongue a little easier.

The most awkward introduction in my family’s history had to be when my friends met my eldest brother, Homer, in a pizza place near our school. He spotted me across the restaurant and did the whole cover-my-eyes-with-his-hands-and-say-guess-who thing. My friends, terrified at the sight of a strange man old enough to be my father addressing me this way, sat frozen in silence. They knew that I had older siblings, but I never actually specified how much older. Afraid I was about five minutes away from becoming another crime statistic, they seemed more than ready for him to leave. My brother read their faces and hurried to introduce himself properly, but the uncomfortable moment could not be erased. Later, I tried to explain to my friends that having siblings who are decades older than me is a staple of being a member of a blended family, only to have them stare at me blankly.

Whenever my friends are introduced to a different sibling of mine, they squint their eyes in confusion trying to figure out exactly whose son or daughter this person is. It’s gotten so bad in the past that I’ve actually had to sketch make-shift family trees on paper — only to be given the same dumb looks over and over. Every time, without fail, I get fed up and say, “We’re related, OK?!” and hope that the conversation is done.

When I was younger, everyone worried that having all of these incredibly distant relatives would confuse me, leaving me hurt when I discovered that some of these people weren’t really family by blood. My mother and grandmother nervously waited for the day to tell me that Big Mama, my older sisters’ grandmother and my caretaker on days when my mother was busy, wasn’t technically related to me. I put all of their worries to rest when Big Mama told me that I had to eat all of my food before I had dessert. As an angry 3-year-old with a smart mouth, I put my hands on my so-called imagination (my hips), and informed Big Mama that she wasn’t “my real grandmamma, no way.” I expected her to spank my arrogant behind for being disrespectful, but to my surprise she laughed until she was in tears. She was relieved that I was more perceptive than they had believed.

Giggles, Tickles and Cat-fights
Despite the challenges of having a maze of relatives, the awkward introductions and the invisible walls of unfamiliarity formed because we were raised in separate houses, I feel close to my siblings.
It’s been hard though. The stories we don’t share clash with the memories we’ve made and lead to uncomfortable pauses in conversations until something new comes up. Age differences among us make the line of communication kind of thin at times. My eldest brother constantly censors himself in my presence, and my sisters run little pearls of information back to my mother whenever I tell them a little too much about my personal life. Then there are the strained conversations with my estranged eldest sister that are full of rehearsed questions about my schoolwork. Often, I give her generic answers that I would rattle off to a stranger.

Even still, I cherish the times we share: when my sister and I pretend to fight like cats, the tickle wars and constant giggles my brothers, sisters and I hide behind our parents’ backs, and getting the mounds of Christmas and birthday greetings that make me feel lucky to have so many people in my life who love me. The fact that my family experiences differ from the norms of a standard family pales in comparison to the happiness that having so many relatives brings me.

Lauren is a senior at Tri-Cities High, and she loves Oreos.