Relationships, laughter and beards!

This weekend my sister will be 50! Which means I am already 52!

Usually, we are not together in August as we are separated by our annual holiday travels.

But this year I wanted it to be different, so Sam and I arranged our August vacations so that we would be able to celebrate together.

Then Covid-19 happened and social distancing. Like so many we too will be apart in the back garden at my parent’s house.

As a family unit we’re good at adapting to new situations. I know they’ll be no be close contact, however, there will be time to reflect while looking over old photo albums with the hand sanitising gel being passed around like a game of pass-the-parcel!

You know, when I look back at my relationship with my sister, I remember the immense sense of care I had for her even at an early age. I never really thought of her as my little sister, more as an equal person to me. That was something that must have come from my parent’s approach to fair parenting.

I remember one particular part of our relationship when we often played a game with the following poem, “If you were ME and I were YOU what a funny world it would be.”  Together we imaged all sorts of different scenarios and formed ideas about who we were.

It’s difficult to remember how old we were but I guess we were at junior school. We often thought about who we were, what we might become one day and what our differences were, from the physical size we were to the accent and traits we had.

Another happy memory growing up with my sister was the laughter we shared and uncontrollable fits of the giggles and tears of laugher running down our faces and those embarrassing leaks of wee when we had both totally lost it.

The cause of these giggles was often due to something random and often involved a man with a beard or a stern women’s face. For the life of me, I have no idea why a man with beard was the thing that set us off.

I would like to add that there is nothing wrong with a beard, but maybe in the 1970’s they were less manicured.

I also remember our giggling fits would happen at the most serious moment, like when we were inside a church sitting in a wedding congregation, or in a doctor’s waiting room with our mum.

I guess a sibling relationship is a significant part of our lives and it forms a big part of our emotional and psychological development. A relationship with a sibling can take many different routes and it’s not always easy. It forms part of the way we read each other and understand each other.

But going back to those fits of giggles, I think that was all about the emotion of excitement and at other times tension, as we had a duty to control our excitement in public. We had to focus on not looking at each other for fear of the uncontrollable laughter starting.

Of course, when we were then later free to laugh, the tension had built up so much that letting it out it was pure bliss for us, but probably not for my parents.

In the past 30 years Jo Hall has had three careers, one in corporate marketing, one as business entrepreneur running a successful health and beauty business, and one as Remedial Yoga Teacher. She has been married to David for 30 years. She is working towards becoming a foster carer and enjoys writing about relationships, people and comms. She has one son, who is studying to be a material scientist and a daughter in-law (by default) who has been dating her son for 5 years and is studying psychology.