I had grown up a single child living with my dad after my mom left. She couldn’t take his drinking any longer and left when I was about a year old. My dad’s sisters moved in and took care of me. I recall a few times my mother visited to see me but nothing is very clear from those early days.
When I was about 7, my dad decided to get married again. My step-mom had a couple of kids from her previous marriage and so we were about 7 people living in a small house with just my dad’s job keeping us afloat. Naturally resources were stretched and soon one of my aunts got married and left. Still the money didn’t stretch far enough and I was sent off to live with my mother (who was going through her lesbian phase at the time and living with a butch gangster of a woman, guns and all).
So my relationship with my step-siblings was quite strained at the beginning and not very much sibling-like. I would visit my dad’s family over the weekend and weekdays were with my mom. As time went by, we became friends and eventually started to treat each other as friends, if not siblings.