Do you remember your childhood the same as your sibilings?

I grew up with 2 sisters who are half-siblings (10 yrs older, and 3 yrs. older). They didn't like my father. They also always made sure to tell me I wasn't their real sister, and would be leaving as soon as they were out of school. As a result, I felt very isolated. True to their word, they left - first, the eldest dropped out of school and left without warning (with help from her father & brothers). The sister closer to my age, left as soon as she finished high school. I am mostly emotionally attached to my brother, who is 7 years my junior. He and I have similar personalities.
 

Macfan said:
No but never really seeing things the same, wouldn't make sense to remember things the same? Maybe that's just me? Don...
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No, not just you, even if all present for something, everyone's physical and emotional perspectives differ. Some people consciously tell the story differently some unconsciously distort the facts.
Serenity4321 said:
Oh me too! It cracks me up to hear my sister and brother remember events totally differently! We all drank but no one had problems with alcohol..just the usual party stuff...
I too swear my account was what REALLY happened... :D

I also wonder about forgotten memories..I find it interesting with one of my best friends when she and I reminisce about times we were together and one of us brings up something the other has no memory of :oops:
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The part i made bold: Couple of reasons for this ---
Capacity and accuracy of memory varies widely even with siblings.

Some people have more visual memories, others tend to remember their lives in verbal narrative, with only an occasional very pleasant or very disturbing image.

Some of us blessed/cursed with very detailed memories of both types, with olefactory & tactile memories accompanying the basic. Olefactory is particularly strong memory trigger.

Some people have memory blocks about their own bad behaviors. Some people block things due to traumas.

Sometimes age makes a difference, most of us have only 'snapshot' memories of things from before we acquired language or while we were acquiring it. As a 20 something i remembered a very vivid unpleasant dream i had at an early age (2-4 yrs) as actually happening in the house we lived in then, but it couldn't have because it involved a shower stall, and that house had no indoor plumbing.
 
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Nathan said:
No, my brother is 8 years older, and we really led different lives. That plus there was some "dysfunctionality" in our family that my brother avoids talking about. I just let it go, no longer really relevant at this stage in the game.
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According to my sibilings I'm the one who forgets how dysfunctional our family was. I'm not forgetting that stuff, but while they blame everything on our parents I also lay blame on them, but those are the memories they forget.

There is a large age difference, I am the youngest so understand we led different lives. I guess the other thing is they were all more of a family unit, by the time I came along my folks were done parenting so I ran wild.

Aside from memories of our parents even memories of interaction between us sibilings vary all over. I don't talk with my sibilings often but spoke with my brother yesterday and found myself shaking my head saying "no, that's not what happened". It's kind of exhausting, I told him that's why I stay away.
 

C50 said:
According to my sibilings I'm the one who forgets how dysfunctional our family was. I'm not forgetting that stuff, but while they blame everything on our parents I also lay blame on them, but those are the memories they forget.

There is a large age difference, I am the youngest so understand we led different lives. I guess the other thing is they were all more of a family unit, by the time I came along my folks were done parenting so I ran wild.

Aside from memories of our parents even memories of interaction between us sibilings vary all over. I don't talk with my sibilings often but spoke with my brother yesterday and found myself shaking my head saying "no, that's not what happened". It's kind of exhausting, I told him that's why I stay away.
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"That's why I stay away" .. Just recently I said those same words to my brother, in relation to our 2 sisters.
 
If I brought up the memory of getting baby ducks and chickens for Easter, they remember the same. Many good memories with siblings.
 
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Jace said:
No, isn't it...a..right brain, left brain thing
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Right brain left brain distinctions are over-rated especially in regard to women, we have a larger corpus callosum-- the tissue that facilitates communication between the two hemispheres. (Why women are usually better at multi-tasking).

There have also been instances where people with brain injuries were able to retrain their brains, and draw new 'wiring maps'.
 
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Pinky said:
"That's why I stay away" .. Just recently I said those same words to my brother, in relation to our 2 sisters.
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Yep. I get it. Right this very minute I am dealing with a string of text because of drama between my brother and sister, all over something from 25 years ago. He said, she said, broken promises, totally different memories between them, yadda yadda yadda. I keep saying "I DO NOT CARE, LEAVE ME OUT OF IT". Im going to just shut my phone off.
 
DebraMae said:
My only sibling, a brother, passed away almost 30 years ago. I wonder sometimes if we would have been close and seen things the same way. We both had problems with our father. He liked to play us against each other. My brother was about 40 when he died and our father lived until he was 92.
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I'm so sorry you lost your brother so young and didn't have enough time with him.

I can relate to your story because my grandfather used to play my mother against her sister and 2 brothers when she was growing up. She was always jealous of her older sister because she went to college. When her sister was dying in a nursing home, my mother never even contacted her.

She was jealous of her younger brother because when he was born she was no longer "Daddy's Little Girl", and they didn't speak until they were elderly. My grandfather seemed to enjoy encouraging the competitiveness, and they turned out to be complete messes because of it. He was orphaned when he was very young, so I think he was deeply affected by it and needed the adoration.

Seeing how dysfunctional they were made me happy I was an only child.
 
My 2 siblings were older so had different experiences. Plus my sister was a very difficult child and my brother had I were not.
 
My brother and I are ten years apart. That's why I call him "the mistake". (we probably both were). We lived in the same house with the same parents, but we have totally different memories of events. It's not like I remember a red balloon, and he a blue one. I remember a balloon, and he swears there was no balloon. We have such different memories of events. There is ten years between us, and when you're a kid, ten years is a big deal.
 
fuzzybuddy said:
My brother and I are ten years apart. That's why I call him "the mistake". (we probably both were). We lived in the same house with the same parents, but we have totally different memories of events. It's not like I remember a red balloon, and he a blue one. I remember a balloon, and he swears there was no balloon. We have such different memories of events. There is ten years between us, and when you're a kid, ten years is a big deal.
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Similar to this ^ but more extreme (plus I had more than one sibling).
We'd definitely have different memories because we had different lives. As only one example, the very popular sibling had many friends, teen years included a houseful of kids, whereas after I finished elementary school I wasn't permitted to have any friends visit.
 
fuzzybuddy said:
My brother and I are ten years apart. That's why I call him "the mistake". (we probably both were). We lived in the same house with the same parents, but we have totally different memories of events. It's not like I remember a red balloon, and he a blue one. I remember a balloon, and he swears there was no balloon. We have such different memories of events. There is ten years between us, and when you're a kid, ten years is a big deal.
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I have an elder brother 9 years older.. then there was me... then more siblings.. and another sister last of all.. 8 years younger
 
My childhood memories are different from my older sister,younger brother,they got to stay home
From ages 10-16 {in the 60's} I went to 2 boarding schools,the 1st co-ed school in Deerfield, Mass,2nd girls school in Toronto,Canada. The last 2 yrs lived with my aunt&uncle in Baltimore,MD.I had a difficult time with school work,was put back twice in 4th &9th grade,couldn't get into any of the schools here in Buffalo
The experience did something emotionally to me
 
Patricia said:
Reading other people's post made me realize I had an ideal childhood.
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Parts of mine were idyllic, others not so much. As i've mentioned there were 4 of us and the difficult parts weighed heavier on middle two than oldest and youngest [me] despite the fact the older 3 had a traumatic shared history.
 
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I have two older sisters, one 7 years older than me and the other 11 years older, so we certainly had different experiences. My dad even confessed to me at one time that after having raised two daughters (they were rather overprotective of them) that they had kind of given up "parenting" once I hit my teenage years. Not saying they were bad parents but being the spoiled brat baby boy, I did get away with a lot more things then my sisters every would have.

Anyway, my mom changed a lot by the time my sisters got late into their teenage years and I was still in my preteens so the few shared perspectives my sisters and I have are very different.

One event that we all share with the same perspective and I still remember very vividly is when I was very young. Family was at the dinner table having dinner and my sister made some smart aleck comment. My dad told her that as punishment she had to clear the dinner table and wash all the dishes. She then got up and started to clear the dinner table as we were all still eating. When she grabbed my dad's plate (as he was still eating) I remember feeling as though the world had stopped. I had never seen my dad shake with anger so much in his life. Obviously she got kitchen clean up duty for a long time after that incident.
 
3 sisters, 1 brother, 3 alcoholic uncles. Father probably would have been if he didn't have cronic gall bladder problems. Oldest sister insisted he was, brought me a book about siblings dealing with alcoholic parents, never read it. I don't remember any issues along those lines. He drank a little, although his friends were made from a different mold, grew up dealing them.
 
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