Siblings From Another Mother Quotes

I remember how I would eye with envy all the kids in our neighborhood, in my school, who had a little brother or sister. How bewildered I was by the way some of them treated each other, oblivious to their own good luck. They acted like wild dogs. Pinching, hitting, pushing, betraying one another any way they could think of. Laughing about it too. They wouldn’t speak to one another. I didn’t understand. Me, I spent most of my early years craving a sibling. What I really wished I had was a twin, someone who’d cried next to me in the crib, slept beside me, fed from Mother’s breast with me. Someone to love helplessly and totally, and in whose face I could always find myself.

I’ve noticed that if several siblings have breaks in the mother-child bond, they’ll often express anger or jealousy, or feel disconnected from one another.

I offer the wisdom of Eric Fromm, in his classic book The Art of Loving.1 He says that the healthiest people he has known, and those who very often grow up in the most natural way, are those who, between their two parents and early authority figures, experienced a combination of unconditional love along with very conditional and demanding love! This seems to be true of so many effective and influential people, like St. Francis, John Muir, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mother Teresa, and you can add your own. I know my siblings and I received conditional love from our mother and unconditional love from our father. We all admit now that she served us very well later in life, although we sure fought Mom when we were young. And we were glad Daddy was there to balance her out. I know this is not the current version of what is psychologically “correct,” because we all seem to think we need nothing but unconditional love. Any law, correction, rule, or limitation is another word for conditional love. It is interesting to me that very clear passages describing both God's conditional love and also God's unconditional love are found in the same Scriptures, like Deuteronomy and John's Gospel. The only real biblical promise is that unconditional love will have the last word!

Even without world wars, revolutions and emigration, siblings growing up in the same home almost never share the same environment. More accurately, brothers and sisters share some environments — usually the less important ones — but they rarely share the one single environment that has the most powerful impact on personality formation. They may live in the same house, eat the same kinds of food, partake in many of the same activities. These are environments of secondary importance. Of all environments, the one that most profoundly shapes the human personality is the invisible one: the emotional atmosphere in which the child lives during the critical early years of brain development. The invisible environment has little to do with parenting philosophies or parenting style. It is a matter of intangibles, foremost among them being the parents’ relationship with each other and their emotional balance as individuals. These, too, can vary significantly from the birth of one child to the arrival of another. Psychological tension in the parents’ lives during the child’s infancy is, I am convinced, a major and universal influence on the subsequent emergence of ADD. A hidden factor of great importance is a parent’s unconscious attitude toward a child: what, or whom, on the deepest level, the child represents for the parents; the degree to which the parents see themselves in the child; the needs parents may have that they subliminally hope the child will meet. For the infant there exists no abstract, “out-there” reality. The emotional milieu with which we surround the child is the world as he experiences it. In the words of the child psychiatrist and researcher Margaret Mahler, for the newborn, the parent is “the principal representative of the world.” To the infant and toddler, the world reveals itself in the image of the parent: in eye contact, intensity of glance, body language, tone of voice and, above all, in the day-today joy or emotional fatigue exhibited in the presence of the child. Whatever a parent’s intention, these are the means by which the child receives his or her most formative communications. Although they will be of paramount importance for development of the child’s personality, these subtle and often unconscious influences will be missed on psychological questionnaires or observations of parents in clinical settings. There is no way to measure a softening or an edge of anxiety in the voice, the warmth of a smile or the depth of furrows on a brow. We have no instruments to gauge the tension in a father’s body as he holds his infant or to record whether a mother’s gaze is clouded by worry or clear with calm anticipation. It may be said that no two children have exactly the same parents, in that the parenting they each receive may vary in highly significant ways. Whatever the hopes, wishes or intentions of the parent, the child does not experience the parent directly: the child experiences the parenting. I have known two siblings to disagree vehemently about their father’s personality during their childhood. Neither has to be wrong if we understand that they did not receive the same fathering, which is what formed their experience of the father. I have even seen subtly but significantly different mothering given to a pair of identical twins.

The alienating effects of wealth and modernity on the human experience start virtually at birth and never let up. Infants in hunter-gatherer societies are carried by their mothers as much as 90 percent of the time, which roughly corresponds to carrying rates among other primates. One can get an idea of how important this kind of touch is to primates from an infamous experiment conducted in the 1950s by a primatologist and psychologist named Harry Harlow. Baby rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and presented with the choice of two kinds of surrogates: a cuddly mother made out of terry cloth or an uninviting mother made out of wire mesh. The wire mesh mother, however, had a nipple that dispensed warm milk. The babies took their nourishment as quickly as possible and then rushed back to cling to the terry cloth mother, which had enough softness to provide the illusion of affection. Clearly, touch and closeness are vital to the health of baby primates—including humans. In America during the 1970s, mothers maintained skin-to-skin contact with babies as little as 16 percent of the time, which is a level that traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse. Also unthinkable would be the modern practice of making young children sleep by themselves. In two American studies of middle-class families during the 1980s, 85 percent of young children slept alone in their own room—a figure that rose to 95 percent among families considered “well educated.” Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to make many children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance. Only in Northern European societies do children go through the well-known developmental stage of bonding with stuffed animals; elsewhere, children get their sense of safety from the adults sleeping near them. The point of making children sleep alone, according to Western psychologists, is to make them “self-soothing,” but that clearly runs contrary to our evolution. Humans are primates—we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees—and primates almost never leave infants unattended, because they would be extremely vulnerable to predators. Infants seem to know this instinctively, so being left alone in a dark room is terrifying to them. Compare the self-soothing approach to that of a traditional Mayan community in Guatemala: “Infants and children simply fall asleep when sleepy, do not wear specific sleep clothes or use traditional transitional objects, room share and cosleep with parents or siblings, and nurse on demand during the night.” Another study notes about Bali: “Babies are encouraged to acquire quickly the capacity to sleep under any circumstances, including situations of high stimulation, musical performances, and other noisy observances which reflect their more complete integration into adult social activities.

I was a bird. I lived a bird's life from birth to death. I was born the thirty-second chick in the Jipu family. I remember everything in detail. I remember breaking out of the shell at birth. But I learned later that my mother had gently cracked the shell first to ease my way. I dozed under my mother's chest for the first few days. Her feathers were so warm and soft! I was strong, so I kicked away my siblings to keep the cozy spot. Just 10 days after I was born, I was given flying lessons. We all had to learn quickly because there were snakes and owls and hawks. My little brothers and sisters, who didn't practice enough, all died. My little sister looked so unhappy when she got caught. I can still see her face. Before I could fly, I hadn't known that our nest was on the second-lowest branch of a big tree. My parents chose the location wisely. Snakes could reach the lowest branch and eagles and hawks could attack us if we lived at the top. We soared through the sky, above mountains and forests. But it wasn't just for fun! We always had to watch out for enemies, and to hunt for food. Death was always nearby. You could easily starve or freeze to death. Life wasn't easy. Once, I got caught in a monsoon. I smacked into a tree and lay bleeding for days. Many of my family and friends died, one after another. To help rebuild our clan, I found myself a female and married her. She was so sweet. She laid many eggs, but one day, a human cut down the tree we lived in, crushing all the eggs and my beloved. A bird's life is an endless battle against death. I survived for many years before I finally met my end. I found a worm at some harvest festival. I came fluttering down. It was a bad mistake. Some big guy was waiting to ambush hungry little birdies like me. I heard my own guts pop. It was clear to me that I was going to die at last. And I wanted to know where I'd go when I died.

Every mother has a different story, though we tend to group them together. We like to think that partnered moms have it good and single moms have it rough, but the truth is that we’re a diverse bunch. Some single mothers have lots of child-free time because their kids are regularly in the custody of their fathers. Some seldom get a break. Some partnered mothers split child-care duties with their spouses in egalitarian ways; others might as well be alone. Some mothers of both varieties have parents, siblings, and friends who play active roles in their children’s lives in ways that significantly lighten the load. Others have to pay for every hour another person looks after their kids. Some mothers, single or partnered, can’t afford to pay anyone for anything. Some can and do. Others can and won’t. Some are aided financially by parents, or trust funds, or inheritances; others are entirely on their own. The reality is that, regardless of the circumstances, most moms are alternately blissed out by their love for their children and utterly overwhelmed by the spectacular amount of sacrifice they require.

They entered the summer parlor, where the Ravenels chatted amiably with his sisters, Phoebe and Seraphina. Phoebe, the oldest of the Challon siblings, had inherited their mother's warm and deeply loving nature, and their father's acerbic wit. Five years ago she had married her childhood sweetheart, Henry, Lord Clare, who had suffered from a chronic illness for most of his life. The worsening symptoms had gradually reduced him to a shadow of the man he'd once been, and he'd finally succumbed while Phoebe was pregnant with their second child. Although the first year of mourning was over, Phoebe hadn't yet returned to her former self. She went outdoors so seldom that her freckles had vanished, and she looked wan and thin. The ghost of grief still lingered in her gaze. Their younger sister, Seraphina, an effervescent eighteen-year-old with strawberry-blonde hair, was talking to Cassandra. Although Seraphina was old enough to have come out in society by now, the duke and duchess had persuaded her to wait another year. A girl with her sweet nature, her beauty, and her mammoth dowry would be targeted by every eligible man in Europe and beyond. For Seraphina, the London Season would be a gauntlet, and the more prepared she was, the better.

Where are you from?" She asked without thinking. "I was born in the mountains." Runach said with a shrug. "The place doesn't matter." "Do you have siblings?" "Yes, several. Not all are still living. He smiled faintly. "You are full of questions this afternoon." "The library was a bad influence on me." Runach smiled briefly. "And I believe that was three questions you asked me, which leaves me with three of my own for you to answer." "That was two." "I don't count very well." "I think you count very well," she said grimly. He only smiled again. "I'll contemplate which answers I'll have and let you know." Aisling thought she just might be dreading them, but couldn't bring herself to say as much. "What was your home like?" she asked. "Another question." "You look distracted." He smiled and a dimple peeked out at her from his unscarred cheek. "You are more devious than I give you credit for being. I am keeping a tally, you know. I will expect a like number of answers from you." She stared at him for a moment or two. It was difficult not to, but he didnt seem to mind. "Why?" She asked finally. "Beacause you are a mystery." "And do you care for a mystery?" "I am obsessed by a good mystery," he said frankly. "More than enough to pry a few answers out of you, however I am able." "And what if I am not inclined to give them?" She asked, her mouth suddenly dry. "Then I will wonder about you silently." "In truth?" she asked, surprised. Runach smiled, looking just as surprised. "What else would I do? Beat the answers from you?" "I don't know." She said slowly. "I don't know what soldiers do." He shook his head. "Hedge all you like, if you like." "Your mother must have been a well-bred lady." She said, frowning. "Why do you say that?" "She seems to have taught you decent manners, for your being a mere soldier." "She tried," he agreed, looking out over the sea. Aisling turned and looked at him. "How long ago did you lose her?" Runach took a deep breath and dragged his hand through his hair, before he bowed his head and slid her a look. "That answer will cost you dearly." Her first instinct, as always, was to say nothing. But the truth was, she lived and breathed still. She could tell him perhaps a bit about herself, without bringing the curse down upon her head. Aisling took her own deep breath. "Very well." "My mother died twenty years ago, though I vow it feels like yesterday." "How did she die?" Runach was very still. "My father slew her and half my siblings. Time has done the rest of that terrible work I suppose. She shut her mouth, and put her hand on his arm. "I'm sorry." "I am too," he agreed. Runach shook his head, then reached for her hand to draw it through his arm. "Let's walk whilst you spew out the answers you owe me. You'll be more comfortable that way, I'm sure." "I'm not sure you should worry about my comfort" Aisling managed, "not after those questions." "But I do. And now that I have bared my soul, I think you should worry about my comfort and do the same.

You might expect that if you spent such an extended period in twelve different households, what you would gather is twelve different ideas about how to raise children: there would be the strict parents and the lax parents and the hyperinvolved parents and the mellow parents and on and on. What Lareau found, however, is something much different. There were only two parenting “philosophies,” and they divided almost perfectly along class lines. The wealthier parents raised their kids one way, and the poorer parents raised their kids another way. The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children’s free time, shuttling them from one activity to the next, quizzing them about their teachers and coaches and teammates. One of the well-off children Lareau followed played on a baseball team, two soccer teams, a swim team, and a basketball team in the summer, as well as playing in an orchestra and taking piano lessons. That kind of intensive scheduling was almost entirely absent from the lives of the poor children. Play for them wasn’t soccer practice twice a week. It was making up games outside with their siblings and other kids in the neighborhood. What a child did was considered by his or her parents as something separate from the adult world and not particularly consequential. One girl from a working-class family—Katie Brindle—sang in a choir after school. But she signed up for it herself and walked to choir practice on her own. Lareau writes: What Mrs. Brindle doesn’t do that is routine for middle-class mothers is view her daughter’s interest in singing as a signal to look for other ways to help her develop that interest into a formal talent. Similarly Mrs. Brindle does not discuss Katie’s interest in drama or express regret that she cannot afford to cultivate her daughter’s talent. Instead she frames Katie’s skills and interests as character traits—singing and acting are part of what makes Katie “Katie.” She sees the shows her daughter puts on as “cute” and as a way for Katie to “get attention.

The alienating effects of wealth and modernity on the human experience start virtually at birth and never let up. Infants in hunter-gatherer societies are carried by their mothers as much as 90 percent of the time, which roughly corresponds to carrying rates among other primates. One can get an idea of how important this kind of touch is to primates from an infamous experiment conducted in the 1950s by a primatologist and psychologist named Harry Harlow. Baby rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and presented with the choice of two kinds of surrogates: a cuddly mother made out of terry cloth or an uninviting mother made out of wire mesh. The wire mesh mother, however, had a nipple that dispensed warm milk. The babies took their nourishment as quickly as possible and then rushed back to cling to the terry cloth mother, which had enough softness to provide the illusion of affection. Clearly, touch and closeness are vital to the health of baby primates—including humans. In America during the 1970s, mothers maintained skin-to-skin contact with babies as little as 16 percent of the time, which is a level that traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse. Also unthinkable would be the modern practice of making young children sleep by themselves. In two American studies of middle-class families during the 1980s, 85 percent of young children slept alone in their own room—a figure that rose to 95 percent among families considered “well educated.” Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to make many children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance. Only in Northern European societies do children go through the well-known developmental stage of bonding with stuffed animals; elsewhere, children get their sense of safety from the adults sleeping near them. The point of making children sleep alone, according to Western psychologists, is to make them “self-soothing,” but that clearly runs contrary to our evolution. Humans are primates—we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees—and primates almost never leave infants unattended, because they would be extremely vulnerable to predators. Infants seem to know this instinctively, so being left alone in a dark room is terrifying to them. Compare the self-soothing approach to that of a traditional Mayan community in Guatemala: “Infants and children simply fall asleep when sleepy, do not wear specific sleep clothes or use traditional transitional objects, room share and cosleep with parents or siblings, and nurse on demand during the night.” Another study notes about Bali: “Babies are encouraged to acquire quickly the capacity to sleep under any circumstances, including situations of high stimulation, musical performances, and other noisy observances which reflect their more complete integration into adult social activities

We forget that as daughters we have a ministry to our fathers, mothers, and siblings. By helping them and building them up we keep them strong enough to fight their battles. Whether it is through cooking for our families, making or thrifting clothes, pulling weeds from the garden, or changing another diaper, it is all kingdom building. Sure, repetition doesn’t feel like a glamorous calling, but it is exactly what God has laid out for you. It is the mission field He gave you. If you were on the mission field in Africa you’d be doing the same cleaning, teaching, and repeating. The real challenge is will you accept it?

I told Grayden of my misadventure with this suitor of mine, and he laughed, recalling the subsequent dinner during which I had spilled wine on his father. “Of all the potential marriage partners I’ve been introduced to, I haven’t had a single experience as memorable as either of yours.” He paused a moment to ponder, a twinkle in his green eyes. “But then, it has to be acknowledged that you are the common factor in these peculiar occurrences.” “I don’t know what you mean to suggest,” I replied, fingering the golden horse that hung from the chain around my neck, the horse that seemed to give me permission to be a free spirit. Grayden noticed what I was doing, and he smiled. When evening fell, we left the faire to attend dinner at Grayden’s home with his family. He had three younger siblings, a mother from whom he had inherited his slight build, and a father who had not forgotten nor forgiven my conduct toward him. He tossed frowns in my direction throughout the meal and asked about the well-being of my mother and siblings, unconcerned with my own. “Your father dislikes me, doesn’t he?” I whispered to Grayden in the parlor, noticing that I was offered tea, but not wine. “He has a tendency to hold grudges,” Grayden muttered back. “I should know--he’s been holding one against me for nineteen years.” I stifled a laugh with my hand, earning yet another glower from Lord Landru.

Although Bubby doesn’t like to talk about the past, sometimes she can be convinced to tell the story of her mother. Her name was Chana Rachel, and a lot of my cousins are named after her. Chana Rachel was the fifth child in a family of seven, but by the time she got married, she only had two siblings left. A diphtheria epidemic had passed through their small Hungarian town when she was younger, and Bubby’s grandmother had watched one and then another of her children die, as their throats closed up and oxygen no longer reached their lungs. When four of her children were already dead, and little Chana Rachel developed the same high fever and mottled skin, my great-great-grandmother wailed loudly in desperation and with the rage of a lunatic rammed her fist down her daughter’s throat, tearing the skinlike growth that was preventing her from breathing properly. The fever broke, and Chana Rachel recovered. She would tell that story to her children many times, but only Bubby lived on to tell it to me. This story moves me in a way I can’t quite articulate. I imagine this mother of seven as a tzadekes, a saint, so desperate to save her children that she would do anything. Bubby says it was her prayer to God that helped her daughter recover, not the breaking of the skin in her throat. But I don’t see it that way at all. I see a woman who took life into her own hands, who took action! The idea of her being fearless instead of passive thrills me. I too want to be such a woman, who works her own miracles instead of waiting for God to perform them. Although I mumble the words of the Yom Kippur prayers along with everyone else, I don’t think about what they mean, and I certainly don’t want to ask for mercy. If God thinks I’m so evil, then let him punish me, I think spitefully, wondering what kind of response my provocative claim might elicit in heaven. Bring it on, I think, angry now. Show me what you’ve got. With a world that suffers so indiscriminately, God cannot possibly be a rational being. What use is there appealing to a madman? Better to play his game, dare him to mess with me. A sudden feeling of peaceful resolution washes over me, that traditional Yom Kippur revelation that supposedly comes when one’s penance has been accepted. I know instinctively that I am not as helpless as some would like me to think. In the conversation between God and myself, I am not necessarily powerless. With my charm and persuasiveness, I might even get him to cooperate with me.

When Arturo had ordered her taken into custody, Darling knew the next step would be her execution. As the mother to the heir and widow of the last governor, his mother was to keep herself pristine and chaste in memory of his dead father for the rest of her life. For another man to touch her was viewed as an act of high treason on both their parts. The guards had seized her and she’d been screaming, protesting her innocence and begging for mercy. His brother and sister had been holding on to her waist, crying and pleading for their mother’s life. Darling had been frozen by terror. His father had only been dead three years and all he could hear was the promise he’d made to him the last time they’d spoken. “If anything should ever happen to me, Darling, swear to me that you’ll make sure your mother and siblings are taken care of. They’re not as strong as you. You’ll make a great governor one day. I know it. It’s why I trust you to do right by the three of them.” Still, they’d all screamed and cried until Darling was deaf from it. More guards had come forward to pull his brother and sister away and to handcuff his mother for her execution while Carus had stood there, silent. No word to deny or defend the woman he’d slept with. The woman who’d risked her life and endangered her children for him. He was useless as a protector. And his mother would die if Darling didn’t do something. So he’d seized on Maris’s personal secret to save her life. Biting his lips to make them swell, and pinching and clawing his neck to turn it red, he’d run forward to stop his mother’s arrest. “He’s my boyfriend. I’m the one who slept with him.” The words had flown out of Darling’s mouth before he could stop himself. Or think through the consequences. But

Howard Schultz, the man who built Starbucks into a colossus, isn’t so different from Travis in some ways.5.22 He grew up in a public housing project in Brooklyn, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with his parents and two siblings. When he was seven years old, Schultz’s father broke his ankle and lost his job driving a diaper truck. That was all it took to throw the family into crisis. His father, after his ankle healed, began cycling through a series of lower-paying jobs. “My dad never found his way,” Schultz told me. “I saw his self-esteem get battered. I felt like there was so much more he could have accomplished.” Schultz’s school was a wild, overcrowded place with asphalt playgrounds and kids playing football, basketball, softball, punch ball, slap ball, and any other game they could devise. If your team lost, it could take an hour to get another turn. So Schultz made sure his team always won, no matter the cost. He would come home with bloody scrapes on his elbows and knees, which his mother would gently rinse with a wet cloth. “You don’t quit,” she told him. His competitiveness earned him a college football scholarship (he broke his jaw and never played a game), a communications degree, and eventually a job as a Xerox salesman in New York City. He’d wake up every morning, go to a new midtown office building, take the elevator to the top floor, and go door-to-door, politely inquiring if anyone was interested in toner or copy machines. Then he’d ride the elevator down one floor and start all over again. By the early 1980s, Schultz was working for a plastics manufacturer when he noticed that a little-known retailer in Seattle was ordering an inordinate number of coffee drip cones. Schultz flew out and fell in love with the company. Two years later, when he heard that Starbucks, then just six stores, was for sale, he asked everyone he knew for money and bought it. That was 1987. Within three years, there were eighty-four stores; within six years, more than a thousand. Today, there are seventeen thousand stores in more than fifty countries.

With a break in the mother-child bond among siblings, each child might express his or her disconnection with the mother differently. One child might become a people pleaser, fearing that if he’s not good, or he makes waves, he’ll lose connection with people. Another child, believing that connection is never hers to have in the first place, might become argumentative and create conflict to push away the people close to her. Another child might isolate and have little contact with people at all. I’ve noticed that if several siblings have breaks in the mother-child bond, they’ll often express anger or jealousy, or feel disconnected from one another. For example, an older child might resent the child born later, perceiving that the younger child received the love that he or she did not get. Because the hippocampus—that part of the brain involved in creating memories—isn’t fully operational until after the age of two, the older child may not consciously remember being held, fed, or cuddled by the mother, but remembers the younger child receiving their mother’s love. In response, the older child, feeling slighted, can unconsciously blame the younger child for getting what he or she did not. And then, of course, there are some children who don’t seem to carry any family trauma at all. For these children, it’s quite possible that a successful bond was established with the mother and/or father, and this connection helped to immunize the child from carrying entanglements from the past. Perhaps a window of time opened in which the mother was able to give more to one particular child and not the others. Perhaps the parents’ relationship improved. Perhaps the mother experienced a special connection with one child, but couldn’t connect deeply with the others. Younger children often, though not always, seem to do a bit better than first children, or only children, who seem to carry a bigger portion of unfinished business from the family history. When it comes to siblings and inherited family trauma, there are no hard and fast rules governing how each child is affected. Many variables, in addition to birth order and gender, can influence the choices siblings make and the lives they lead. Even though it may appear from the outside that one sibling is unscathed by trauma, while another is encumbered, my clinical experience gives me a different perspective: Most of us carry at least some residue from our family history. However, many intangibles also enter into the equation and can influence how deeply entrenched family traumas remain. These intangibles include self-awareness, the ability to self-soothe, and having a powerful internal healing experience.

Live like there is no tommorow cause tommorow is never promised. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. God does not judge us on our fathers sins. Father son and holy spirit I hold you nearest. To be a mother you need to actually be there and represent what a mother is. You don’t get to be the mother if you show up after the kids are already grown up. She’s like all those animals at the end of the story who show up to eat the Little Red Hen’s bread. The train crawls out of the Tapachula station. From here on, he thinks, nothing bad can happen. People come here to prosper. You have nothing here. What have you accomplished? You can't live through or claim there your children if you weren't there for them. The garden is a metaphor of opposites man women good evil up down everything has a opposite. God had already planned my destiny before I was created. Treat others how they treat you or how you want to be treated. My kids are my world and I will protect them from your evil manipulative narcissistic ways. Forgive but never forget. Knowledge is power. You don't own me. I only owe my servitude to the family I created and God. Love thy father who art in heaven. Your only Australian if you live in Australia. If you live in America your American stop trying to get freinds and likes based on where other people think your from. Don't blow your own trumpet. A bad worker blames his tools. No worries mate she'll be right. Couldn't hand a man a grander spanner The game was a fizzer. I wouldn't piss on them even if they were on fire. If you think I'm bad you should see my sister. She gives me cupcakes for my birthday. Happy birthday man whore. She's like that white girl at the gangbang party Your mother and father would be proud lol. narcissistic siblings keep score and feel compelled to outplay a sibling. They often triangulate in the family, playing two against one. Children reared in narcissistic homes rarely feel connected to one another as adults which is a good thing. Suck a big black cock casey. And mum try too lol and dad I'm not even gonna bother keep paying that child support mum and keep it for yourself and your drugs and alcohole dad Lord knows

At the end of World War II, some of the Grant Study men were majors; others were still privates. What made the difference? It turned out that the men’s attained military rank at discharge bore no relation to their body build, their parents’ social class, their endurance on the treadmill, or even their intelligence. What did correlate significantly with attained military rank was a generally cohesive home atmosphere in childhood and warm relationships with mother and siblings. Twenty-four of the twenty-seven men with the warmest childhoods made at least first lieutenant, and four became majors. In contrast, of the thirty men with the worst childhoods, thirteen failed to make first lieutenant, and none became majors. We don’t breed good officers; we don’t even build them on the playing fields of Eton; we raise them in loving homes. This result would undoubtedly have astonished physical anthropologist Earnest Hooton (see Chapter 3), whom the Study asked to write its first book.4 I offer this story for its morals. One is that belief isn’t enough—however impassioned our convictions, they need to be tested. Another is that information does nothing for us if we don’t make use of it. My brief excursion here answered a question that the Study had been entertaining from its very beginnings; the data that finally answered it had been available for almost seventy years. And a third: that longitudinal studies protect us from exactly such pitfalls, and from our other shortcomings of foresight and method. They give us the flexibility to re-ask old questions in new contexts, and to ask new questions of old data. That is a very important point of this book, and one I’ll keep returning to.

The book of Genesis is a window into what cultures were like before the revelation of the Bible. One thing we see early on is the widespread practice of primogeniture—the eldest son inherited all the wealth, which is how they ensured the family kept its status and place in society. So the second or third son got nothing, or very little. Yet all through the Bible, when God chooses someone to work through, he chooses the younger sibling. He chooses Abel over Cain. He chooses Isaac over Ishmael. He chooses Jacob over Esau. He chooses David over all eleven of his older brothers. Time after time he chooses not the oldest, not the one the world expects and rewards. Never the one from Jerusalem, as it were, but always the one from Nazareth. Another ancient cultural tradition revealed in Genesis is that in those societies, women who had lots of children were extolled as heroic. If you had many children, that meant economic success, it meant military success, and of course it meant the odds of carrying on the family name were secure. So women who could not have children were shamed and stigmatized. Yet throughout the Bible, when God shows us how he works through a woman, he chooses the ones who cannot have children, and opens their wombs. These are despised women, but God chooses them over ones who are loved and blessed in the eyes of the world. He chooses Sarah, Abraham’s wife; Rebecca, Isaac’s wife; Samuel’s mother, Hannah; and John’s mother, Elizabeth. God always works through the men or the boys nobody wanted, through the women or girls nobody wanted.