How well does anyone really know their siblings? If you’re lucky, having a sibling is like having a partner-in-crime, or another best friend, who knows you inside out and who you can always rely on. If you’re not as lucky, perhaps you barely know anything about the person you share DNA with – but not dinners, jokes and holidays. Perhaps you have a brother or sister in name only, or maybe they don’t even know you exist. The relationship between me and my brother has – I’m happy to say – shifted to the right end of the sibling spectrum in recent years and I’m really enjoying our newfound closeness.
We’re developing a relationship where we can offload to each other about personal things without one of us getting embarrassed or offended, like we often did as teenagers. We’ve learned how to offer support and properly get to know each other as people. Previously we’d never socialised together unless forced to at family events, but now I want to spend time with him. Strangely enough, I’ve realised that it’s only after burying our father and finding out we’re half-siblings that we’re even closer than ever.
My brother and I got on well growing up but drifted apart quite a bit as teenagers. Before that, though, I remember long stretches of time in our family home at the weekends spent getting up to mischief together, and always managing to present as a united force against our parents if one of us got in trouble. We had play fights with pens, water-balloon fights, bath fights – and lots of actual, physical fights – but most of the time we quickly made up.
My brother has always been able to forgive faster than me. Sometimes, I would selfishly encourage his reckless behaviour for my amusement; one time when he was nine, he broke his collar bone after I had told him that bouncing on the bed was a good idea. “I hope you’re proud of yourself,” my dad had hissed as we drove to the hospital, my mum cradling him in the car as he sobbed.
My brother is three and a half years younger than me and he grew up shy and easygoing, whereas I’ve always been more dominant and gregarious. I don’t think the chasm between us during our teenage years had much to do with the fact that he’s white and I’m black, but I can’t really be sure. I remember asking him what his friends thought of the fact that he had a brown-skinned sister. Was he embarrassed? Awkward? “I just tell them it’s none of their business,” he replied indignantly, as our mum had encouraged us to do.
It wasn’t until our father died, and I found out he wasn’t my biological father and started looking into my heritage, that we started to talk about just why my brother is milk-bottle white, with freckles and blue eyes, and that I’m very much the polar opposite, that I could – and probably do – have a bunch of black brothers and sisters out there somewhere. He has offered any support I might need in tracing them, but I wonder what he thinks about me half-belonging to a second family. Until we had these conversations last year, we had both been united in wilful ignorance: we had both wanted to believe that we were fully related.
Mum and I are proud of the way in which my brother has developed the kind of emotional maturity and diplomacy that we saw in my dad these past few years, and finding out we’re not full siblings has enabled us to talk more frankly about our strange family dynamic. No matter where the search for my roots takes me, or how different we look physically, I know the relationship between my brother and me will only grow stronger.
