By: Jeri Katherine Warden
We develop many kinds of relationships over the years of our lives; from our closest friends and family to our most recent boyfriend or girlfriend, to husbands and wives, to the mailman or teller you see all the time. We have a range of relationships on a spectrum of intimacy. Now that you’re an adult how and where do your siblings fit into these relationships? Have your relationships with your siblings changed as you’ve gone through life changes such as moving out, going to college, starting a job, getting married, or starting a family?

Thus has been a year of major changes for my family. My youngest sister has just graduated from high school and will start college in the fall. My oldest sister is getting married this Saturday. She is the first of my three sisters and one brother—“the kids”—to be saying the big “I do.”

Yet, even though my youngest sister has walked across the stage, received her diploma, and registered for fall classes, and even though my oldest sister is less than a week away from the altar, I still have us frozen in time. I think back to somewhere in elementary school when we used to dress up, play Barbies, make forts, and play tricks on the babysitters.

I love those memories and part of the child in me doesn’t want to move on from them. Those were the days when we were all under one roof, and the only worry in our little world was finding the lost Barbie high heel so that she could go on her date and be married by the end of the hour.

But we’re not playing Barbies any more, and we haven’t played such games for over a decade. Surely our relationships as siblings have grown as we’ve changed so much over the years.

Maybe I’m getting sentimental. I’m happy. I’m very happy in all the ways my sisters and brother have grown into adults. I just can’t believe we’re adults. I remember as a child I wished so much that I could be an adult. Now that I’ve come to a new place in my life in my ever evolving relationship with my siblings, all I want to do is be a kid again.

But life moves us through time, and we definitely don’t live in Never Never Land. Today my siblings and I live in five different states and three different time zones. Yet, somehow I still feel we’re close, and some days closer than ever. I wonder if that closeness will change as my sister joins another family; sharing was never easy for me as a kid.

See more devotions from Jeri Katherine and our other Young Adult writers, or find our how you can become a writer yourself at our By Young Adults for Young Adults devotion page.