Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

krebscout wrote: Genuine, if you're reading this, I'd love to see your input. Your relationship with your family is the envy of the town, or at least my small section of it. You know that I believe your house is just like the Weasley's.

You're just saying that because you know the redheads of the family.

I don't think my parents had a strategy, but they're both very easy-going, and as a result, so are we. They're the opposite of helicopter parents, perhaps bordering on negligent even, and that really worked for us. I think major factors in all us kids getting along were/are closeness in age, there being a lot of us, and us being poor. It's like what you said about being bored together - we didn't take big family vacations. Instead, we spent most of our time playing in the backyard where the picnic table became a pirate ship and we had a giant pile of plywood we were allowed to make anything we wanted out of. My parents largely left us to our own devices, and I think that's very important. Also, between the eight of us kids we only had two rooms, so we were four and four for a long time. As a result, everything was fairly communal - I only remember having a handful of toys or stuffed animals that were mine.

We're all about two years apart, or every other grade in school, so there was a lot of overlap in friends, especially those people who were between us in age and could swing either way. That's how I snagged you as a friend, actually. Plus, most of us are girls, which makes the overlapping friend thing feasible. We also didn't have very many youth in our ward, so my sisters and I routinely made up half the YW. There was no going off with just the mia maids, because we didn't have enough people for that.

We all get along fairly well, but there are divisions, or rather, there are sub-groupings amongst us. 1, 2, and 3 are a unit as the oldest children, and then 2 and 3 always had their own thing going on because they're closest in age. 4 was always bullied by 3, so she spent more time with me (5). I'm closest to the siblings on either side of me (4 and 6), but I'm also the oldest of the youngest four, so I was the de facto leader of 6,7, and 8. 6 and 7 played tennis in HS and grew close as a result. 1, 2, 3, and 4 did drama and/or choir, but there was never anything competitive about it; they just did what they were good at.

We all had siblings we thought were mean, or bossy, or we had nothing in common with, but it didn't matter because there was always someone else to play with. If 4 was busy I could hang out with 6 and vice versa. If they were both busy, I had 7 and 8 as back-ups. Sheer numbers meant that everyone had someone to be buddies with. If someone was a jerk they had to stop being a jerk real quick if they wanted someone to play with, because we had other options and they knew it.

Today I get along pretty well with everyone except #1 who has a way of talking about really personal things like they're not personal, and I don't know how to deal with that. I have three awesome sisters here at BYU with me, but I'm moving soon, and I'm just now realizing that I've never been apart from my closest siblings. When 4 went off to school I had 6. Then I left for school and was reunited with 4. Then 6 came out and the three of us were all together again. I've been away from home for six years, and I've been married for over three of those years, but leaving my sisters behind doesn't sit well with me - I feel like I'm leaving for college all over again.

Genuine Article wrote:Today I get along pretty well with everyone except #1 who has a way of talking about really personal things like they're not personal, and I don't know how to deal with that.

Her own personal information or other people's personal information?

Katya wrote:

Genuine Article wrote:Today I get along pretty well with everyone except #1 who has a way of talking about really personal things like they're not personal, and I don't know how to deal with that.

Her own personal information or other people's personal information?

Both. A good example would be the time we took a family trip to Florida and I was in a car with her and another sister and my dad was driving. And she's up in the front seat going on and on about how she's irregular so she's decided to go on birth control, which for me was too much information. I felt embarrassed, not only for me, but for my dad, who I was willing to bet didn't want to hear about his daughter's periods. But I was willing to suffer through hearing about it, until she dragged me into it. Without even batting an eye or considering how I might feel she says "and Genuine's irregular, so she'll have to go on birth control too..."

I am a very private person, so I really hated her for that. She's constantly declaring things, just like she declared the state of my reproductive system to a car full of people. In her mind, if it's not private to her, it shouldn't be considered private by anybody else. Now that I'm graduated from school she keeps talking about me having a baby, except she doesn't ask me, she tells me I'm going to have one. She has declared that I will move closer to home and have a baby right away, and that will work out for everyone. She kept pushing me about it the last time I was home and got upset when I wouldn't tell her my plans. I pointed out that to most people, when to start a family is a private matter. I even made the case that some people are infertile, and asking about that sort of thing is insensitive. She insisted that if I was infertile, she ought to know about it. I disagreed, and she couldn't understand why. She just has no sense of privacy, which is funny because she just got her masters in Family Therapy and Counseling, so I hope she can at least keep information to herself on a professional level.

Eeesh, that sounds like a very difficult situation to be in. (I'm a very private person, too, so I sympathize with you not wanting other people to share your personal information without your permission.)

It's kind of fun to read everyone's childhood remembrances. I'm the 3rd of 8, and I can see a lot of my family dynamics in a lot of the stories from other people from big families. When I was little, my mom was always looking for fun things for us to do- within reason, she had no desire to structure all our time. But she would often take us on field trips to museums and parks and up the canyons. Then she got very sick when I was twelve and is wheelchair bound and completely dependent on my dad by now. So my siblings and I grew really close out of a shared burden and the responsibilities of raising each other. I am generally considered to be the youngest of the big kids, and I took on a maternal role for the youngest kids especially. The two youngest would call me "mom" in a true Freudian slip fairly often when they were little. My big brother and I were the second mom and dad while we were at BYU and we were super, super close because of that. We would get together to discuss the scheduling of the car we shared, when we were going home to cook dinner, when we were going home to go to parent teacher conferences, band concerts, plays, or to clean up the yard.
Now that we're all getting grown up, we have a kind of casual closeness- we get together fairly often, we have formal family dinner at my parents' house once a month (everyone but my oldest sister lives in Utah still). I kind of think of my parents' house as a kind of hostel- only two kids live at home any more, but anyone might casually drop by at any time. We have a secret group on Facebook where we keep each other abreast of funny things the grandkids did, personal events, family parties, etc. But we don't call each other every day. It's a pretty good medium, I think.