ABSTRACT

This chapter is about siblings, how siblings find each other, use each other, and sustain each other. Siblings can also play an important role where there is an idealization or denigration of a child, or negative view of the child, or where for other reasons there is an absence of mind in the mother. Siblings may turn to each other in the face of loss of the father. It is not unusual for children to have absent fathers, for men can be disturbed by the creation of a family and abandon their partner when a child is born. These adolescent children of survivors may turn to their siblings for support rather than challenge an already damaged parent. Patterns of mothering are sometimes avoided by the false and defensive creation of sibling status between mother and daughter, or father and son. A mother who mothered her child as if she were a sibling may respond similarly when she becomes a grandmother.