Every relationship you form, from friends in high school to your lifetime partner, is influenced by growing up with a brother or sister with a disability. When you are young and bring friends home from school, you often use your brother or sister with a disability as a kind of litmus test. If your friend doesn?t feel comfortable with your sibling, or worse, makes fun of him, or says something insensitive like,
“What?s the matter with him?” that friend is not likely to be invited back to your house. It?s not a bad way to judge people, actually. Someone who can connect with your sibling, no matter how severe his disability, is probably a sensitive, compassionate, kind person and one worth having as a friend.
The trouble is that during adolescence, you tend to be embarrassed by a brother or sister who can?t talk or who makes strange noises, looks odd or keeps trying to touch the visitor. You say you don?t want anyone as a friend who can?t accept your sibling, but often you don?t really mean it. You want to be part of a normal family, and sometimes you?re ashamed of your sibling. Don?t feel guilty about it. It?s a normal feeling. We?ve all felt that way at some time or other.
When you are older and start to think about establishing a permanent relationship, people tend to go in two different directions. One way, particularly for women, is to choose a mate who needs fixing. All their lives they have lived with someone who needed fixing, and women may feel they are equipped to fix anyone who comes along. So they choose a person who is an alcoholic, or a workaholic, a drug addict or a manic-depressive. After long, frustrating periods of trying to change the other person, they realize that people can?t be fixed. They have to do it themselves. Then the marriage or relationship breaks up, and unless the sibling gets some therapy, he or she is likely to make the same mistake over and over again.
“I?ve never really had a satisfying relationship with a man,” said Alicia, the sister of a man with mental illness. “All the men I have chosen have been injured in some way. I married a man whose sister had bi-polar disorder. The marriage was disastrous. He wasn?t physically abusive but he was emotionally abusive. I kept trying to fix him. then I realized, he doesn?t want to be fixed. Fix yourself.” She finally divorced him and has learned to look for men who don?t carry around serious problems.
A better choice is to find someone who is responsible and strong, and knows from the very beginning that he or she will have to help with the sibling with the disability some day, when the parents are no longer able to.
“The last woman I was seriously involved with was wonderful with Tommy,” said Alex, a 36 year-old pediatrician whose brother has mental retardation. “I think that was one of the reasons I was so much in love with her. I remember once we were walking in the city, hanging out with Tom, and I was holding her hand. Then, without saying anything, she just kind of nudged me and I looked over and saw that Tommy was holding her other hand. That?s such a sweet memory.”
We siblings of people with disabilities have a much wider choice of mates open to us because we are used to overlooking the outside of a person to see what is within. Differences in race, height, weight, hair color, don?t matter to us as much as what that person believes in, is interested in, is passionate about.
Obviously, figuring out how to have healthy relationships with friends, partners and members of your extended family is one of the most important tasks of your life unless you plan to escape entirely into a house in the woods or a monastery. If you don?t have an open, honest rapport with your parents, then a therapist, counselor or support group can help you understand the positive effects a sibling with a disability has on your relationships. Compassion, tolerance and appreciation of differences in other people will result in a stronger bond with your partner, as long as you don?t sacrifice your own needs to those of the other person.
iCan columnist Mary McHugh is an experienced writer who has a brother with disabilities. Contact her at siblings@icanonline.net
icanonline.net
April 17, 2001