Growing up, I remember a time when I was endlessly pestering my parents for a sibling. I wanted a younger brother or sister so badly. Although I can now look back and say that it was mostly so that I could have a playmate that was always there when I wanted to play. At the time, my parents and I were living in Israel, and my parents, though free with their attentions toward me, were nonetheless often busy with classes or working, and the neighborhood kids weren’t always around. But at that naive age, I didn’t realize that a brother or sister wouldn’t always want to do something with you – or do what you wanted them to do.

I learned this a few years later, after we moved back to the same town as my mom’s sister. I found I didn’t always want to do what my older cousin wanted me to do – like dress her younger sister (who was my age) and me in fancy clothes and make us dance.

And still later, when my mom went back to work and I spent time in the care of the neighbor down the street with her two daughters or in the care of my aunt and her two daughters, I began to really see what daily living with siblings could be like: often fun, but riddled with conflict, negotiations, and sometimes tears. I began to appreciate being able to go home to the always wagging tail of my cocker spaniel.

In years to come, however, I would realize that I got as close to having siblings as an only child could get through not only these two pairs of sisters, but through my many cousins.

Siblings share a closeness in part because only they understand “the family” in a way that no one outside could understand. Siblings know a history and sequence of events that make up your story in a way that anyone coming in at a later chapter must often work very hard to understand. Siblings are your first peers, your first mentors, your first pupils, and your first charges.

For all those things, I had cousins. With nine aunts and uncles from both sides of my family, I had 19 first cousins, some of whose kids I was actually closer to in age than their parents, so the number of cousins is substantial. While we may not have shared parents, we shared a certain history and knowledge of each other’s lives that few others could understand. In this life, there are many reasons that we choose people we meet to become our family and I have many friends that I count as family. But I have been blessed by a wealth of family that I also consider friends, and in particular, I have been blessed by cousins that are siblings to me. And I am grateful.