Sibling Rivalry or Sibling Revelry with Julie Lyles Carr

Just because your family doesn’t mean you’re friends. Find out why sibling and sibling in-law relationships matter and what you can do to help make yours and your children’s relationships with each other as strong as possible in this final episode on our series on The In-Laws and the Out-Laws on The AllMomDoes Podcast with Julie Lyles Carr.

Show Notes:

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Transcription:

Julie [00:00:14] My very earliest memory is reaching, reaching, reaching through the slots of the crib. And then, my arm got stuck. I started screaming and my mom did what any great mom would do, she grabbed a camera. I’m Julie Lyles Carr you’re listening to the AllMomDoes podcast, and we have been in a series that we’ve been calling the Inlaws and the Outlaws. It’s all about the relationships that we have and how those relationships that are beyond just our nuclear family of origin or the family that we’ve built with our spouse. It’s about how those relationships influence us. Make for a lot of color in our world. And texture can also lead to a lot of challenge and conflict. And so we spent the last few weeks talking about different iterations of your family, of those people that through friendship or through your romance, you’ve chosen to make part of your extended fabric of family.

Julie [00:01:12] Now, why would my mom grab a camera when my arm got stuck in a crib? Well, I wasn’t the child in the crib. I was a toddler and I was outside the crib. But I was trying to reach my brand new baby brother. He had just arrived home from the hospital and I desperately wanted to be able to touch him and to see the new baby. And when I did, my arm got stuck. And lest you think that my mom was being cruel, it was just this really sweet moment, actually, except for the fact I was freaking out that she wanted to record the moment where it sort of connected with my little toddler brain that there was this new baby in the house and I really wanted to have access to him. I wanted to love him. I wanted to touch him, I wanted to see him. And I got stuck. But all that aside, it really is a sweet moment and there really is a picture of it.

Julie [00:02:02] Well, you know, as I’ve been thinking through this series, we’ve had some great guests on. I also want to encourage you to go back and listen to the opening episode that I did about the relationship of being a daughter in law and having a relationship with your in-laws. We’ve also had along the way Robin Jones Gunn and Tricia Goyer, and they talked about how to prepare our kids for marriage, including prepping them for their in-law relationships. And then we heard from the two matriarchs of the Duck Dynasty family as Kay and Lisa gave us an insight into their relationship and what’s made their in-law connection work. We also heard from Shay Youngblood in a gorgeous conversation about chosen family and how being intentional and thoughtful about who we need in our lives and how we can come alongside others can truly help us build a family in those places where we might feel a gap. There might be someone who’s not in our lives that who normally would have been there through blood relationships that we can choose to make sure that we have somebody on our side, part of our community, who fills that place.

Julie [00:03:08] Well, today, I want to take a deeper dive into sibling relationships, both the ones you have by growing up together in your nuclear family and the ones that you might have gained through your siblings marriages. And we’re also going to talk about ideas for helping your own kids become friends while growing up in your home and how to navigate when your kids genuinely don’t like each other. I did not realize for a very long time how fortunate I am that my two brothers are two of my best friends. It felt really simple to me. They were my earliest and dearest friends. As I was telling you that story. One of my earliest memories, I think my very earliest memory involves one of my brothers. It was only later that I began to realize that that is often not the case. Actually, as I was preparing for the studio. I was chatting with a friend of mine who is this incredible mom and powerhouse of a woman. There are so many things I admire in her mothering, in her career, and all kinds of things that she’s done in the kind of friend she is. She’s absolutely incredible and truly one of the people that I would say is one of the most relationally smart people I know. Does that make sense? Like she just knows how to carry on these deep, gorgeous friendships and her relationships with her kids and with her spouse. But she was sharing with me that she has a heartache because one of her kids simply doesn’t like their siblings. Like she’s got these kids. The other kids are all buddies, but this one kid does not like their siblings. I’ve also had friends who have no real relationship with their siblings, even though their upbringing may have been great and their parents may have done everything they need to do to build relationships with their kids. But for whatever reason, the relationship simply doesn’t exist. And then, of course, sadly, there are those situations where the sibling relationship was so strained, was so difficult, so fractured that now into adulthood it simply doesn’t exist.

Julie [00:05:14] I’ve also had people share with me that they felt like they enjoyed a great relationship with their sibling until their sibling got married, and these layers and nuances to the relationship then came into play. Maybe they didn’t like their siblings spouse, maybe their sibling spouse did something or said something, or maybe even seemed to pull their sibling away from what had been the nuclear family. And my friend might feel like they got left with the dregs in that relationship. So we’re going to talk about all that stuff today. The In-laws Outlaws Sibling Sibling in Law Factor. As we wrap up this series.

Julie [00:05:55] When I started looking into scripture about siblings and sibling in-law relationships, they’re all over the Bible. It’s very fascinating. And we see right at the top Cain and Abel. That sibling relationship, Jacob and Esau, Rachel and Leah, the two girls competing for the same guy sisters. Yeah, that one, Moses, Miriam and Erin, that triplet of siblings if you will, who helped lead the Israelites out of Egypt. We also see Ruth and Orpah. We talked about Ruth’s story in the first episode in this series. There is also Jesus and all of his siblings. There are commentators who think that Jesus may have had about seven siblings, a combination of sisters and brothers, and the dynamics there are pretty fascinating. I mean, you’ve probably heard a pastor talk about it sometimes. Can you imagine being the sibling of Jesus when it came to a feeling of competitiveness within the family because who was ever going to live up to that within the family of origin? James and John are siblings that are discussed as two of Jesus’s disciples. Again, siblings show up all over the Word of God, and sometimes it’s in twos like we’ve just talked about. Sometimes it’s in big groups like Jacob’s family of all these different kids. And, you know, I think sometimes we forget that some of the things we experience today, while they may feel modern to us, actually have connection in Scripture. And what do I mean by that? In a lot of the Old Testament family sibling relationships you see, you see a lot of siblings who were actually half siblings or potentially step siblings. So, for example, in the case of Jacob, he had children by four different women. So when we talk about Joseph, he’s the one who his brothers basically betrayed him and sent him to Egypt. You know, he was a half sibling of the brothers who did that to him. And so we see connection. King David also had children by multiple wives, and those siblings struggled in their sibling relationships. We even see recorded in the Word of God that one of those sibling step sibling half sibling relationships ended up in a really tragic story. And so I think that those places where we feel like, okay, does Scripture really have anything to say to us today about sibling relationships, about the complexity of modern families with half siblings, step siblings, all that kind of stuff, does any of that play out for today? Can it say anything to us? And I would respond that absolutely. It does. It does speak into today because there were nuances and layers and challenges and human nature just hasn’t changed that much, right? We want our parents attention. We want the friendship of those growing up alongside us. Or we can also be prone to feeling like we’re being overlooked, like we’re not getting the attention we should be getting. We can at times feel competitiveness, and that has not changed in the millennia of human history.

Julie [00:08:56] Now, I certainly have people in my life and I would struggle the very same way that if I felt like my kids weren’t coming into some kind of friendship, how much that would impact me. And I will tell you, with our eight kids, there are really strong, deep relationships amongst several of them. Overall, they all seem, thank you, Lord, to love each other, to have great connection. But there have definitely been times that some of those relationships have been very strained. Differences of opinion and different choices in life, different ways of seeing things. The pull and tug and the wax and wane of different life circumstances. Those things all play into the relationships with kids. I look back and I see that one of the reasons that I think my brothers and I forged the friendships we had came from something that I really, really hated. If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you may remember that I moved around a lot as a kid and I despised it. I thought it was the worst. One thing it did do, though, is when I got to a new place where everything was completely unfamiliar, when I had what felt like no grounding, when I had no friends, when I had no community, I’d actually brought two of my buddies with me, my brothers. And so in that way, even though that was not the intended outcome that my parents were expecting or thought this was going to be a fruit of these corporate moves, it actually did become that it was this accidental outcome, if you will, of going through these moves as a kid and into high school.

Julie [00:10:37] Now, I’m not suggesting that to get your kids to like each other and to get along, you need to pick up and move all over the country. I’m not saying that, but I do have some things that I think helped set the stage. Now, these are not foolproof, and this is in no way to say that if you enacted these things or if you enact them, you’re going to secure the perfect outcome of relationship and friendship for your kids when they exit your house. But I will say now, now that my kids are almost all the way grown and launched and I’m observing the friendships they now have, I can look back and say, okay, I think that was helpful. So one would be the challenge of some hard times where you have to rely on each other as a family. In my case, that was moving around and I was not going to move my kids. Do you hear that sense? I was not going to have my kids have to go through the same corporate moves that I did as a child. And then guess what? We picked up our kids out of a very secure little nest in community where we had grandparents just down the road and aunt and uncles living in the same town. And we picked up and we moved 12, 13 hours away, depending on traffic. And that was so hard. I had never wanted to do that to my kids. And yet we did. And I will tell you, weirdly, if this makes you feel better at all, if you’re a military family or a corporate family that’s going through moves like this, particularly when you’re moving away from extended family, it did have some of the same result that happened when my brothers and I had to move. My kids learn to rely more closely on each other. I had to lean on my kids at first because they way outnumbered me. And I knew no one in this new city when we moved down to the islands off the Gulf Coast. And so in that way, I do think that there are times that adverse situations where your kids need to lean on each other as much as you hate to see them go through that, just know that it could be a place where your kids get better connected. It can result in stronger friendships. And so we shouldn’t be afraid of our kids going through some stuff of our family needing to really tighten up and be together. Because I do think it is a ground for helping lay a foundation for friendship and for supporting and being part of each other’s lives moving forward.

Julie [00:12:57] Second thing I will tell you is that we did set specific expectations on how our kids were going to treat each other and we held the line. There were lots of other ways that I was a very flexible mom or I was a very distracted mom or I frankly was just a tired mom. And there were things that I let slip through the cracks left, right and center. And I can point all those out to you. But Mike and I decided early on that we weren’t going to have a whole lot of rules. But the ones we were going to have, we were going to really stick to. And one of them was that our kids were never allowed to sass us. They could ask hard questions. They could push back. They could do any of those kinds of things. But it was always going to be done in respectful tones with one another. Now, did that mean that we always maintained these really even speaking styles and no one ever got upset? No, of course not. But everybody knew that there was not going to be a sassy tone that was going to come into the relationship between mom and dad and the kiddos. And we worked very hard to also speak to them in respectful ways. Did I always nail it? No. There were times that I had to go back and apologize for sure. But overall, we knew that was the expectation.

Julie [00:14:18] That was expectation number one. Expectation number two. It was okay if our kids disagreed with each other, it was okay if they fought, but it was never to be physical. And we also very closely monitored and would step in if the verbiage back and forth to one another became abusive or cruel or super angry or name calling any of that. Absolutely not. That was not allowed. We set those ground rules early. Our kids were not confused. This was not a surprise when they bumped up against what we felt like was the edge of respectful or making sure something didn’t go into a physical type of fight or argument. Part of the reason that I think this is so critical is when I hear people talk about the places where their sibling relationships fell apart or why their sibling relationships did not last into adulthood. This is probably one of the key things I hear most from people is that they were allowed to duke it out or they were allowed to say anything. Or maybe they were more of an introverted child and they had a sibling who was a little more brash. And that that sibling was really able to just run roughshod over everybody. Those things that happen in childhood that feel that inequitable, that feel that unfair or that cruel. When you have an older child who’s physically dominating a younger child, those things stick. Those have a way of once everybody reaches adulthood, that person who has felt oppressed the whole time in the nuclear family is understandably likely either going to flare or build some defenses around themselves because they don’t want to have to be subject to that anymore in their adult lives. And so, again, it wasn’t that we tried to prevent any argument with our kids. We told our kids, “You’re going to have times you disagree, you’re going to have times you disagree strongly. And that is okay because disagreements happen within the context of very loving, supportive relationships. What you will not do is destroy each other verbally and you will not throw fists. It will not be tolerated.”.

Julie [00:16:26] Now, of course, the kids now laugh about on occasion when one of them would get physical and another one would start crying and they would say, “No, no, no, stop crying. You’re okay. Don’t tell mom and dad. Here, you hit me, you hit me. You hit me hard.” And so there was some navigating that was going on in the background that we didn’t always know about. But what I will tell you is that navigating happened because they knew that if one of my kiddos showed up and said so-and-so hit me, oh, I mean, it was going to be Thunderdome, it was going to be serious courts of justice that were going to happen after that.

Julie [00:17:02] So I would say this. I think that relationships between our kids are really important. And if you want that for your children, the simplest line you can lay down is we will not be cruel and we will not be physical toward one another. Period. The end. There are lots of other things that you may be tempted to add in. There may be all kinds of ways you want them to talk to one another or that you feel like they need to share in this way or whatever. You know what? Those things will fall into place if you don’t get a baseline of what humanitarian ethics should be in your house. All that other stuff is just window dressing. Get clear with your kids to day what will be tolerated and what won’t. When it comes to the way they treat each other in the context of the home at the most basic level.

Julie [00:17:55] Now, I think it’s also important to let your kids know that, you know what? They may not like each other. I know I just said that, but also telling them that’s okay if they have argument. But our kids do need to know that their personalities that gel and personalities that don’t. And so when you have kids who one of them does things in a certain way, that kind of drives another one crazy. That’s okay. You don’t need to talk the kid out of it who finds whatever their sibling is doing to be really irritating. At the same time, it doesn’t mean the kid who is doing the thing that’s irritating to the other child has to stop what they’re doing. Part of learning to live in community, part of learning to truly embrace people for the originals they are. And y’all know that’s my drumbeat that we love and embrace originality as that you’re not going to gel with everyone and you’re not going to like the way that people do things, even if it’s not something that’s a moral issue. You just don’t like their approach. You just don’t like their strategy toward life on certain things. That’s life. We reiterated to our kids a lot. It is okay if you don’t like each other, however, you will respect each other. What this does when you set that up as a precept is I feel like it gives your kids an advantage to knowing then in later life how to work with other people, how to manage themselves in an office setting when there’s someone that you know just interpersonally is not their cup of tea, but they need to be able to work together. It’s a message that I think gets lost somehow. I don’t know exactly how this happens, but it feels like we both shame people for having preferences about the people they like. And at the same time, if we say, “Well, it’s fine for you to have your preferences, yeah, that person should stop what they’re doing.” Well, that doesn’t work either.

Julie [00:19:51] It’s interesting. Maybe you’ve had this experience too. I can remember in youth group and in settings like that where there would be a group of us who would just really click. We just really got each other. We laughed at the same things. We liked the same things we had affinity and then there would come that day and youth group, you know what I’m going to say? Where we would all get shamed for developing a click and for being exclusionary in the eyes of some of our youth leaders. Now, was that a danger and a possibility? Absolutely. Of course, there’s always a danger of clicks and people being excluded. I understand the heart behind what was being said, but what wasn’t acknowledged is the reality is there are just certain people that you’re going to jive with and that includes your siblings. You may have a couple of siblings that you guys get along famously and you may have a couple of siblings that even though you were all raised together, you’re just not as much each other’s type. And we’ve told our kids, that’s okay. It’s okay if you really don’t quite understand each other. If you have different ways of doing things, if you have some different priorities, if you have some things that irritate the fire out of each other. But here’s what we are going to do. In the context of our family, we are going to love each other and we are going to respect each other. That kid’s right to do that thing their way is just as valid as you kid over here, who it’s irritating. I understand it’s irritating you. What’s within your control that can take you out of the irritating situation or help you ignore the irritating situation or, I don’t know, put some headphones on. And for the kid who’s doing it in the irritating way. Hey, you know what? You have the right to do this this way. And you might should be mindful of those around you for whom it might prove a little bit irritating or frustrating.

Julie [00:21:42] When that context exists, it takes the pressure off. We would tell our kids frequently, You don’t have to be friends. You don’t. It is our hope you will be friends when you come out of our home. We would love that for you because we know the value of it. We know the joy of it. We know the long standing investment of it. But it’s okay to own where you’re different. You might just find that take some of the pressure off your kids or off you with some of your sibling relationships when you look at it through that lens. Now, we did tell our kids, right, you don’t have to like each other. However, we have always reminded them that these siblings of theirs and their sibling spouses are most likely the people they will walk through life with in some of the most challenging, new, important situations they can imagine. I knew how much I loved my brothers. I knew they were my best friends. I knew they were my brothers. I did not completely understand the connection and the gratitude I should have for that connection until my dad got really sick. And when that happened, we did not realize until it happened that my mom was in the early stages of dementia. And what this meant was that even though my mom was involved in a lot of the critical care decisions we had to make for my dad, we began to untangle and realize, Oh man, we have to really step in. We have to respect her as his spouse, but she’s not really in a place where she can really make some quality decisions here. And in that moment, I can tell you I was the most grateful I’d ever been for the investment that my brothers and I had made in our adult relationships with each other.

Julie [00:23:41] Now, I didn’t realize that’s what we were doing at the time. We made it a priority to see each other several times a year. One brother and I, for a period of time lived in the same community, which was awesome. And we were together all the time. We did stuff together all the time. But even after I moved away and then I was many hours away from that brother and many hours away from the other brother, We still made it a priority to gather at my parents house sometime around the holidays, and we would also try to get together in the summers. That has continued to this day, and now I’m trying to see them even more frequently now that we have a little bit more freedom as some of the kids are launching, I’m trying to get back with them as much as I possibly can. That investment, which actually just felt very social to me, just such a delight to be able to hang out with them was paying deep dividends when we had to make decisions about my dad. Then when we had to make decisions about my mom, then we had to make decisions about their home and how to split up their belongings. Then, when we had to walk through the entire process of dissolving their estate and all of the legal and financial and emotional decisions that follow that. I want my kids to know without being too grim. Y’all need to be on page. Y’all need to be able to get along because there are some deep decisions that you may need to make later in life. And if you have such fractures or such distance between you, it can make a really tough season all the harder.

Julie [00:25:12] Another thing that my parents did that I’m very grateful about, they were very clear about how they laid things out and making things equitable. You may remember in one of my books I write about that my mom was so devoted to making sure things were fair that even under the Christmas tree, to make sure we had the same amount of packages each, she would wrap an individual battery if she needed to, just to make sure that the message conveyed that she was being fair. My husband is in financial services and he will tell you that it can look like sibling relationships into adulthood are strong. But when you intersect a will or last wishes of a parent that are not clear or feel very inequitable, you put the entire ecosystem at risk. And when people are saddled with grief, when they are struggling with a transition. If we as parents have not instilled a sense of fairness, of equity, of fair play, that’s the moment it will rear its head. So my husband and I have also had an ethos in our home where we’ve said things are even things are square and we do the best we can with our resources to reinforce that and to reinforce that in our directives. If your parents have not done that, or if you have not done that for your kids, I want to strongly encourage you to do that. Make it easy for them to be able to maintain relationship into adulthood.

Julie [00:26:51] Here’s another thing, too, that I think is really important. Is to get out of the way of your kids relationships as much as you can. Now, again, I think it’s really important to make sure that there are expectations that there were somebody is not dominating the other. But when your kids start walking into those junior high, high school college ages, you know, for you to keep forcing them together in friendship is likely going to create resistance. They need to forge their own friendship. There is the relationship that they will have simply based on the commonality of where they come from, from your home. But there is the friendship they have to forge on their own if it’s going to be real. I’ve seen parents very well-meaning, continue to bug their kids, if you will, about their adult relationship, saying, “You should call your sister.” Or, “Well, why don’t you get in touch with your brother?” Or. “I know it would mean the world to your sibling if you would do this.” But I want to say as a mom. Just back off a little. If you have a kid who’s in their teens, young adult years, seemingly kind of resistant to a friendship, and you keep pushing it. Let them have enough of their own autonomy in that relationship to stay out of the way. Where I’ve really seen this show up is when a parent goes home to the Lord. You find out real quick if there is actually relationship between their children or not. It either strengthens that relationship and those siblings double down on spending time together or they drift further and further and further apart. And it’s been my observation that the more the relationship was completely generated around mom and dad, the more likely that relationship will grow apart once mom and dad are gone.

Julie [00:28:38] Now let’s talk about siblings in law. I’ve known people who feel like their relationships with their siblings were very strong and very tight, and then their siblings got married and maybe they got married to somebody they didn’t like. Or that sibling in law seems to be pulling away the sibling and spending more time with their extended family and putting more of an investment into those relationships. That scenario is tough because you love your sibling, you want time with your sibling, and you see this other person who seems to be pulling away. First of all, I think it’s important to note this. Your sibling has a voice here. And if your sibling is not saying within the context of their relationship and marriage, hey, these extended family relationships are important to me. I want to caution you about blaming your sibling in law. Your sibling is a grown up. Your sibling has the ability to decide what’s important to them. Now, can they be heavily influenced by their spouse, by your sibling in law? Of course. But too often I think we simplify these stories into good guy and bad guy. Well, everything was great until he got married and then that wife of his…Now, we never see them. Now we never…Hey, hey, hey. That may be true. She may be pulling all of that, but your sibling has skin in the game. And the more we create these overly simplistic stories, narratives around the relationship with our sibling and what’s not working, I think it creates more of a wedge. We have to see our sibling for who they are. And if they feel like they’re getting pushback from us about their spouse. Who do you think they’re going to choose and who should they choose, frankly? This is something that I think can really trip a lot of us up. When your sibling gets married, then their spouse is their primary human relationship. That’s just truth. That’s the way it should be. If you want your sibling to have a successful marriage, their priority should be on their spouse. I’ve actually seen families where the siblings are so close that when someone marries in, it’s like they can sit at the kids table, but they’re not really welcome at the family table. You know what I mean? Like as a metaphor. And so if you truly love your sibling, you’re going to want their spouse to be their priority.

Julie [00:31:02] Here’s the other thing that I think we can get tripped up on, too. When we haven’t had to share time, holidays, experiences with another extended family, our in-laws, family time. It can feel like they may be pulling them away, but let’s hold for a sec. If you’re accustomed to getting to have a week with your sibling in the summer and a week with your sibling during the holidays when they get married, likely if they have a traditional job, that time is naturally going to be split in half. You’re naturally going to see them less as they make room to also make their in-law family a priority, which they should do. So don’t make your siblings have to choose. Don’t make them feel guilty for the time that they’re spending with their spouses family. Your time with your sibling will get reduced. It just will. And it’s not personal. It’s the circle of life. Okay? To quote Lion King, it is the circle of life.

Julie [00:32:03] A couple more things. I really am getting devoted to this idea so you can just know ahead of time that I’m going to weight this a little bit, which is remove yourself from the drama. I guess it’s just really come into more focus for me lately. That there are families, there are people who seem to love drama. They just do like if things get calm, they’re going to kick up some dust. It just is lifeblood to them for some reason. And I’ve seen people in their sibling and their sibling in-law relationships get really tripped up by this because your sibling may be someone who tends toward more drama or maybe your sibling in law is one of those. So it can’t just be a simple, “Hey, what day can we all get together to celebrate so-and-so’s birthday?” It turns into dogs and cats and, you know, all kinds of chaos. And it’s this and but no. And we’ve got to reschedule. And what about and all the things. And in trying to maintain relationship and maintain close relationship with family, if drama starts to come into play, I want to encourage you and I want to encourage myself to just start taking a step back from that. Not leaving the relationship, but just saying, “Here’s what we can do, here’s what we can’t do. Ya’ll let us know how that works out.” Because when we begin to engage in the drama, our tolerance, our tempers, our patients, it’s all going to get tripped up. And when we say to ourselves, this is starting to feel a little dramatic and we can stay on the periphery where we can simply be an observer, we don’t have to be a commenter. We don’t have to turn ourselves inside out, and we don’t have to be an acommodater. We can just say, “Hey, I want to be clear again. Our family would love time with yours. This is when we’re available. If it doesn’t work out this time, that’s okay.” And recuse ourselves from this entire arena of drama that can begin to accelerate. Listen, the way drama grows is when we all contribute to it. So if you want to see drama shrink, get yourself out of it. Simply don’t participate in the things that you don’t need to be participating in that keep drama continuing to boil and grow and spill over. So remove yourself from the drama.

Julie [00:34:36] And then this. I have a friend who is telling me that her therapist shared this with her and I thought it was really profound. And that is this. The goal is a successful relationship, not necessarily a close relationship. Does it make sense? The goal is a successful relationship, not necessarily a close relationship. Now, if you can have both. If my kids can have both with each other, where they have successful relationships and they’re really close. Fantastic. But I have seen people that, you know what? They and their siblings and their siblings in law, they’re just really different. People have different modalities of life. They have different ways of conducting themselves. And one of the things that I’ve seen in those circumstances is someone who is really great at saying, we’ve got a successful relationship, we can get along, we can navigate what we need to navigate. We can make the decisions that we need to make, maybe for mom and dad or for a property we own together. Whatever we need to do, we can do that and we don’t have to be besties. And I think about that with my own kids to take the pressure off of, “Hey, you got to be besties, besties for life.” To just say, “You know what? I want you to have a successful relationship.” That’s powerful to me.

Julie [00:35:52] A successful relationship, to my mind, is comprised of a few things. It means that you can communicate respectfully and effectively. It means that you are able to navigate as adults. It means that you’re able to park some drama at the curb. It means that you care, but you’re not overinvolved. It means that you have relationship with your sibling in law. But that doesn’t mean you have to be besties. I think it’s a really beautiful thing to think about this, that maybe the gap that you’re finding, maybe if the challenge that you’re finding in maintaining a friendship with your sibling is that you’re trying to make it a really besties kind of close kind of relationship. But really what it needs to be is a successful relationship. If you have a sibling who’s making choices that are really difficult, lifestyle choices, if they’ve been caught in an addiction cycle, things of this nature, this statement I think, is very powerful to reconsider the level to which you have been entangled and to get to a place that feels like a successful relationship. Because it is true, there are some relationships that really aren’t meant necessarily to be that close, but they can work really, really well and you can honor each other. You can still have connection, you can still do the things that are really great for you to be able to do as an extended family. But it doesn’t mean that you have to have your boundaries crossed or that you need to continually put yourself in a situation that is not the best for you. So let that resonate and let it resonate for the way that you look at your relationships with your kids. See if that’s something that maybe you need to introduce them to the concept of that they don’t have to be besties, but they do want to have a successful relationship when they come out of your house.

Julie [00:37:41] Now, if you feel discouraged, if you look at your relationship with your siblings, your siblings in law, or you look at your kids relationships and you’re discouraged, I just want to remind you, God understands right off the bat. Look what happened with Cain and his brother. I have to reflect that here they were so close to the time that God put humans on the earth. And right off the bat, a sibling rivalry ensued. It doesn’t mean that when we engage in some of these steps, when we think about the expectations that we have for our family. That we’re going to necessarily be able to mitigate any challenge. It doesn’t mean that. God’s family, God, is this immediate Father to these humans. He’s just put on the earth, runs into these kinds of situations with kids that He’s made siblings.

Julie [00:38:33] What I will say is this by way of perspective. Human nature is challenging. And when we put people into close proximity, those things are heightened in our personalities and in our human nature that tend to sometimes want to be competitive, dismissive, disrespectful, all those things. What I do think is beautiful is when all is said and done. We do have the capacity to choose. We do have the capacity to model. We do have the capacity to lay really appropriate boundaries, both within the context of our own homes on how we’re going to treat each other and within the context of how we conduct our relationships. Once we’ve exited our nuclear homes and we are building families of our own.

Julie [00:39:22] So I hope my prayer for you is that you can have sibling relationships that are life giving and powerful, that you can have connection with your siblings in law that are sweet and that are kind, that your kids discover a way to have successful relationships with one another. And remember this you’re not alone. If that’s not how it’s working out, you’re not alone. If you’re struggling right now and it feels a little heavy because you just don’t see fruit in your life or in these relationships and the way in which you would like. God truly understands. He’s watched His kids through the ages struggle in their sibling relationships. And you know what? He has enough hope in what sibling relationships can be that He encourages us, in His Word, to think of each other as brothers and sisters in Christ. How profound is that? That means there’s a hope in the kind of relationship that we can have as siblings. That becomes the model for the thing He really hopes for His church. That we can see each other as family, that we can engage as siblings, the best kind of siblings, the best kind of sibling revelry, if you will, to revel in life and in salvation and in grace and put sibling rivalry to the side.

Julie [00:40:44] Thanks so much for listening. I hope that this series has been of help as you’ve considered your in-law outlaw relationships. Be sure and check out AllMomDoes on the socials and AllMomDoes.com. You can find all kinds of great resources. Rebecca also has the show notes. Check those out. All kinds of great links and resources for you. I also love it when you come over and let me know you’re listening or questions you have topics you’d love to hear covered. I love that. So please come on over. You can find me particularly on Instagram at @Julielylescarr. And of course, you can also check out Julie Lyles Carr for some great free resources. I’ll see you next time on the AllMomDoes podcast.