In 2011, the midlife sibling connection drew a big red flag as a potential pothole for the aging family. Professionals in aging, the media and midlife life siblings themselves have seen boomer brothers and sisters as a big rut on the road to parent care.
When a catastrophic parental crisis explodes, the baby boomer generation often find themselves at war with their midlife siblings. Wounds from childhood can unsuture. When family must team up to organize elder parent care, the spilled blood can prevent older parents from getting the care they need.
Aging professionals are often thwarted by ancient battles over who Mom loves best. When trying to field a parent care squad, MFT geriatric care managers, geriatricians, gerontologists, geriatric social workers and nurses often run into seething sibling roadblocks. Ancient childhood battles blockading a critical parent care plan leave professionals feeling like their hair's on fire.
What is this sibling relationship? Why do we need it and what goes wrong that midlife siblings can't connect with brothers and sisters in middle age-just when they need them?
Siblings are the longest thread through our life. The most enduring relationship we ever have in our family, brothers and sisters are there when we're just babies and toddlers. They go through pimply teenage misery with us, attend our wedding, and drift off as we raise our kids. Midlife siblings come back to a closer relationship when families are raised. But if that link gets fractured in childhood, it causes an unhealed wound. This is where forgiveness can come to the midlife sibling rescue.
The sibling relationship is often referred to as an hourglass-bulbous when we are young, narrow in our middle years when as we raise our family, and bulbous again when we are older, when midlife and aging siblings want to reconnect their relationship.
Paula Span covered parental caregiving as the only child in her blog
Francine Russo covers siblings issues in her new book, They're Your Parents, Too!: How Siblings Can Survive Their Parents' Aging Without Driving Each Other Crazy.
Paula Span, in her excellent New York Times blog, New Old Age, addressed shattered sibling connections over aging parents Of Brother Where Art Thou posted February 11, 2010.
Anne C. Roark's blog post in the same space Being There Yet Far Away on September 4, 2009, covers the guilt long-distance siblings can experience, trying to care for an aging mom or dad at a distance.
Her August 10, 2009, blog entry, "Year Later Divorce Complicates Caregiving deals with the dilemma that midlife-divorced sisters face having to care for parents with limited funds due by midlife divorce
My new book Mom Loved You Best: Forgiving and Forging Sibling Relationships, written with Kali Cress Peterson (my daughter who is also about to have twins) was just published. The book presents a 10-step forgiveness program for midlife siblings. Readers learn through self-examination and sharing their childhood wounds how to feel better about themselves, while repairing family relationships and ultimately working together with siblings through family crisis and to help aging parents get needed care.
