• Lycaon@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    Definitely my brother! He’s two and a half years younger than me and we’re basically best friends lol, do everything together (well when we can, given we live in different countries) and I just feel like we’re on the same wavelength, you know? Like he understands me in a way no one else does and me with him. Even when we disagree we just figure it out and move forwards, like I think the last time we had an actual fight was when we were in middle school haha

  • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.eeBanned from community
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    2 months ago

    My birth mother, my adoptive mother, my adoptive father, my birth grandfather, and my birth older brother, all for different reasons (it’s complicated).

    For context. I never once in my life had a full conversation with my birth mother. My birth grandparents on her side named her and her six older sisters using a naming scheme, choosing one long C name as the first name and one long V name as the middle name. My birth mother was the youngest and her name is/was Celestina Valentina. She was the only sibling in that generation to have kids and, again, had seven. We were all girls (I’ll get to that in a moment) and, to name us, chose a different aunt’s name to swap the first and middle names around. When it came to me, she swapped her own name to name me. I was born Valentina Celestina. I feel a special connection to her from the details I am given.

    In some other timeline, she might’ve had an eighth child so I wouldn’t have been the youngest, but she and my birth father were hospitalized after that (comatose, not dead), so we had to be adopted. I was adopted by an adoptive mother who happened to be the foster sister of my birth grandfather, making it a semi-family-adoption. My older siblings were adopted by a single adoptive father outside the family but who ended up marrying my adoptive mother after that, making my birth siblings step-siblings. My adoptive mother, perhaps thinking Valentina might not suit me well (while also trying to follow regional customs and knowing my grandfather had a unisex name), also renamed me Tynan after him.

    I had, upon this chain of events, developed a bond with them in different ways. I developed an exclusive bond with my adoptive mother, being all I had in terms of primal attachment, while having a sense of gratefulness and debt to my stepfather but feeling bad it was accompanied by a feeling of distance due to the circumstances. My birth grandfather, who always stayed in my life, was the most classic grandfather one could ask for and would be who I bonded with the most, which made the name change feel a lot less awkward (he was also extremely accomplished, and this may have been a reason for it). His old home is the one I live in today, having been inherited from him a few years ago.

    As for my birth brother or stepbrother, we all kind of had a sibling we chose as our bonding sibling. Veronica chose Vanessa, Virginia, Violetta, and Valeria are a trio, and me and Victoria/Victor chose each other. He came out as transgender when I was eight years old, which would’ve made him thirteen, and I was the first to accept him for it. I always wanted a brother, and in my mind I was getting what I always wanted since I was born. He was always the most special brother I could have. And he still is despite the current circumstances. The death of my adoptive mother was a dark time even though she was 67 when she adopted me, because, combined with the fact my stepfather had died at the beginning of covid and that I didn’t do almost anything in response to his death compared to my adoptive mother, who was also our glue until she died, my siblings all pressured each other to ghost me, with my brother being the most reluctant but ending up following through to be safe. I would have no one if not for my aunts who moved in with me (who are themselves elderly and need care due to an age gap between them and my birth mother) in the home inherited from my grandfather, which was a part of his final wishes.