The Unsung Glory of Sibling Relationships - with Dr. Amy Harris

Like an itch that won’t be scratched, many of us walk around fearing that love is scarce in our lives, that there’s not enough of it to go around. For that itch, the Wayfare essay ”Overflowing with Family” by Dr. Amy Harris offers triumphant relief. Amy is a genealogist and professor of family history at Brigham Young University. In this conversation, we spoke with Amy about her essay and about the family relationships—living and dead—that make us who we are and provide generous company through the life course, but that our culture leads us to undervalue and overlook. Our special focus today is sibling relationships.

Sibling dramas fuel some of our greatest cultural stories. The bible opens with the most iconic sibling rivalry of all time, the one between Cain and Abel, which ends in Cain asking God, “Am I my brother’s Keeper?” and running in shame from his failure as a brother. In modern media, the Stark family in Game of Thrones stands out for their dogged loyalty to each other. As Mallory puts it in this conversation, there’s a romance to sibling relationships (not that kind of romance—calm down). There’s a will-they-won’t-they- stick-together dynamic, as though sibling relationships are ultimate test of our capacity to love.

It’s easy to undervalue siblings because they’re always there. It can be hard to even see our siblings, because they’re always there. Sibling relationships train us to pay attention for no other reason than that “those living, breathing people… belong to me and I to them.” Simone Weil once wrote that our souls have a “violent repugnance for true attention,” but also that we “have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving [us] their attention.”

Whether you have many siblings or none, whether your siblings are chosen or the inherited kind, there are lessons from this conversation on the abundance of love that is always available to us if we learn how to look for it.

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