Literary Mama Rewind: Siblings

Welcome to Literary Mama Rewind! Every few weeks we’ll round up some of our favorite essays, stories, poems, columns and reviews from the Literary Mama archives relating to a particular theme. Brothers and sisters have a special perspective on the life in the family. This month we are looking at stories and poems that remind us of the joys and challenges of having siblings play in our lives.

• Sister Knows Best by Deesha Philyaw from the Column The Girl is Mine

At around age four, Taylor had begun to ask us for a sibling the way some kids ask for McDonald’s or an ice cream cone. Other kids had one, why couldn’t she? We told her we were working on it, but that sometimes it takes a lot of waiting to get a sibling.

• Special Needs Siblings by Vicki Forman from the Column Special Needs Mama

I grew up in a large family, two brothers and a sister. For me, the sibling experience was practically totemic in its necessity and I knew as soon as my daughter was born, it would be important for her to have the same.

• Satan’s Spawn: Or, Getting Along with Siblings in Books by Libby Gruner from the Column Children’s Lit Book Group

Mariah was having trouble with her brother the other morning. “So which one of you is Satan?” she asked. “Because I’m pretty sure he’s the spawn.”

• Siblings by Sybil Lockhart from the Column Mama in the Middle

Four-year-old Cleo stands naked, a mass of matted hair framing her face. She eyes her big sister uncertainly, awaiting her assignment from the fashion director. It seems this is going to be an identical twins morning.

• Mother-Sister by Kim Harrison in Creative Nonfiction

She is my mother-sister. At least, that is what I have come to believe in my thirty-sixth year of life, as I stare down at the plastic shopping bag she drops at my feet, broad smile panning across her face.

• David by Nina Sackheim Badzin in Fiction

She turns her head in the other direction and closes her eyes as she thinks of the way Brett had openly wept when the doctor made the pronouncement. “Another son!” He’d immediately called his brother, father of three girls, and made some jabs about an impending baseball team.

• Ballroom Dance Morning by Marjorie Thomsen in Poetry

My eleven-year-old twins won’t get up/ on Thursdays–ballroom dancing/ in gym class.

• Two Poems by Melissa Sewell by Melissa Sewell in Poetry

Marie Teaches Me to Play Dolls