Really? What are they? Maybe I should incorporate them into my vocabulary!

We have terms for “my fathers new partners child with someone else” etc., and those are in common use. But half-brother? No.

I remember when I was little it was my older brother who would pick me up from pre-school. One day the teacher asked why my brother was a lot older than me, and I said because he comes from my mum’s first marriage (which is true). The kindy teacher did a similar thing to the nurse, “oh, so he’s your half brother”. I remember looking at her oddly and saying, “no he’s my brother”.

And how I felt comfortable answering the teacher in that way, is the way my older brother would respond to people who would say similar things as well. I remember hearing my brother respond to “so she’s only your half sister”, with “no she’s actually my full sister, she’s my sister all of the time, not half of it”. And it stuck.

* It’s massively blended, with “full” and “half” blood siblings, and a whole bunch of technically step-siblings as well. However I didn’t grow up with them or know these step-siblings, so they are not really siblings per se, or constitue the orbit of what is defined as my family.

I don’t like the names of Sarah Palin’s kids. Do I get to call them something else?

I have much younger siblings and it never fails that when I refer to them as my brother and my sister, people pause and offer, “Oh, but your mother/father remarried, so they’re really half-siblings.” To which I reply, “Meh, they’re my siblings.”

People have such a need to organize things the way THEY want them organized: gender, race, religion, etc. I think it’s really mind-blowing for them that other people might defy *their* system of organization, and EXPECT to have their self-identification respected.

I still feel white-hot anger toward a neighborhood mother who, when I was five, chastised me for drinking juice out of a bottle because I was “too old.” Who the fuck was she to tell me off for something that had zero effect on her life or the life of her kids? I see this nurse’s behavior in the same light — it’s pointless control over a person who is in the vulnerable position. It’s an abuse of her authority as a school official.

Look, people are entitled to their opinion and when you put yourself out there, not everyone is going to agree. But the reality is, family structure has been changing for a long time and there just has to be an element of sensitivity when dealing with kids. Thanks for your support…

We’ve always played around with this stuff. Historically, lots of husbands and wives weren’t legally married (it’s only a few hundred years since the institution was formalised). And quite apart from the sibling stuff, children always had uncles and aunties, sometimes grannies too, who weren’t blood (or were such complicated relations that it was too much of a mouthful).