#my mom has the same 20 year gap between her ( the youngest child )

[magicglobe]

canon age differences between charlie & his siblings :

lucy miller : 9 years younger

buddy "cal" calvin-claus : 18 years younger

sandra calvin-claus : 21 years younger

[the-hs-etaverse]

Regarding Guardian Ages

Nanna landed in 1910. John landed in 1996. If Dad is 32 when John lands (the age my dad was when I was born), he’s 45 when John’s 13, and he was born in 1964. That means that Nanna gave birth to Dad when she was 54. That is very late.

Bro was at least 21 when he adopted Dave; the law in Texas specifies that you must be at least 21 to adopt a child. So he’s no younger than 34 (probably 35; see below) by the time the game rolls around. This is a significant age gap for “brothers”, but it’s not entirely out of the question. Also, Bro could potentially be still youthful and bro-like in his mid 30s, especially given his lifestyle.

In a non-canon (?) commission story that Aysha wrote, quote, “1993. [Mom Lalonde] would have been in her twenties.” So, unless Mom has lied about her age, she’s at least 20 in 1993 and therefore at least 22 in 1995, when Rose lands, so she’s at least 35 when the game starts.

There’s a romance between Dad and Mom. Assuming that Mom and Bro landed in the same year, that sets Mom at 35 when Dad is 45. Based on the age gap creepiness rule, the youngest person Dad could date would be (45/2)+7 = 29.5. So their relationship does pass the age gap creepiness rule.

Side note: Dad would have been 10 when Mom landed. When she started kindergarten, he would have been in his freshman year of highschool.

Assuming that Grandpa Harley landed in 1910 and that Jade landed in 1995, considering that Jade was around 5 when he died, he was roughly 90 when Tavros accidentally shot him. He probably wouldn’t have lived much longer than that.

The same ages hold for the post-scratch guardians.

[germanyinusa]

Apply for CBYX!

For those of you who have not heard of CBYX, it is an exchange program between Germany and the United States that is sponsored by the U.S. Congress and German Bundestag. For one year, youth age 15-18 live with a host family and attend German high school. Going the other way, German high school students do the same here in the U.S. Best part is that CBYX is a full scholarship! Sound intriguing? We hope so. We bring this scholarship up now as the deadline for applications looms in the distance--December 1st. In order to arrange the details and finish the app in time, now is the time for action if you want to throw your hat in the ring for this prestigious scholarship.

To help you conceptualize the before, during, and after of being a CBYXer, we asked our social media expert Claire, who completed her year in 2010, to talk with us about her experience.

What made you initially apply to CBYX?

I applied to CBYX for a few reasons. My uncle moved to Germany many decades ago, and I’d grown up hearing this mysterious language being spoken by him and my cousins when they visited. My brother and I would sit with our German-to-English dictionary trying to pick up what was being discussed. That interest combined with a natural sense of adventure led me to favoring the more untraditional path of doing a year abroad in high school and wanting to do it in Germany. Unfortunately, being an exchange student in high school isn’t as common in the U.S. (yet), so winning a full scholarship helped convince my parents and school to support it.

How did you arrange the year abroad with your school?

Arranging a year abroad in high school is difficult if your school hasn’t had a student do it before you. I was the first at my school, and so I had a meeting with my guidance counselor as soon as I could to discuss my options. I suggest bringing materials with you about the prestige of the program, and emphasizing your flexibility. For example, I took online courses for English and History before I left for the year as they wouldn’t be comparable in Germany. I also took the SAT’s abroad as to be on track for applying to college when I returned. Basically, I’d speak in statements with your school about how you will arrange the year rather than coming with questions--as it opens up the door for them saying it isn’t possible or that you would need to repeat a year.

Was it difficult to learn German? Did you speak it before you left?

I hadn’t traveled outside of the U.S. before CBYX, so for me it was shocking to get off the train in Berlin and suddenly everything was in German--signs, announcements, labels. I had two years of middle school/high school German at my disposal which gave me limited vocab to work with. At first, I prioritized what I said because it often required running into a word I didn’t know, which was exhausting. But word by word and day by day my German improved. I was very motivated to learn because with each word I learned my daily life became a little easier and I got to show my true colors a little more. It is a humbling experience to have to lean on people a little more for help speaking or to learn the words for things, but it’s all part of the growing pains of learning a new language and tons of people have done it before you so there is no shame in it.

What was living with a host family like?

I lived with a family in a residential part of Berlin. At home in Pennsylvania, I had a single parent, was the only girl, and was the youngest of four. In Berlin, I was the middle child and had two sisters. The family welcomed me as one of their own, and despite my preconceived notion of all Germans being tall and blonde, I found myself blending in in a family of short brown-haired females. My first day with the family, my host sisters and I played dress up-- giggling as we threw leopard print bras over our shirts and wore big clown-like glasses. I knew then that I’d found myself in the right home.

At the same time, it isn’t all easy--nor is your normal family. Living in someone else’s home requires some flexibility to their set routine, and communicating why you do what you do--which your mom doesn’t have to ask because she has seen you since you were born-- but your host family has not.

What were the biggest cultural differences you experienced?

As cliche as it is, I was shocked by how blunt Germans were. I was used to a lot of sugar coating and it took a while to appreciate how Germans communicate. I also had to get used to the independence given to people my age, as there was a lot more hand-holding and rules back in the states. In Germany, I was treated mostly like an adult, which was duly awesome and scary as it meant quickly taking on a lot of responsibility. Lastly, using public transport was a big difference from taking a school bus or being picked up in a car by your parents. It put a lot of new pressure on me to know how to get home or remember bus routes and schedules.

How is German school different than American school?

German school was WAY different than an American high school. At least in my school--which was an Oberschule, I ended and started at a different time almost every day, depending on which subjects I had. I had a class of about 20 kids who I had my core classes with and my teachers rotated to us instead of vise versa. Exams made up the majority of my grade rather than homework or participation and exams didn’t include multiple choice but rather short answers and essays. Also, there was no such thing as substitute teachers, rather if a teacher had vacation or was sick, you just didn’t have that class. This said, every school is different, so yours may resemble an American school more.

Is there a “good” year to do it?

I did my CBYX program during my junior year. This is arguably the most tricky year to do it, as colleges are looking closely at your grades and most people take the SAT’s that year. It is definitely possible though and I had no issue graduating or getting into a good college. There are pros to doing CBYX as a gap year between high school and college, in that you don’t have to stress out as much about your grades at your German school and can defer your college acceptance.

Did you get to travel during the year?

I got to travel a lot. Some host families will take you on their family vacations. With other CBYXers living across the country and the abundance of train options, it is easy to visit them too. Additionally, going back to young people being given more independence in Germany, it is not unusual to go with friends to other countries and stay in youth hostels or travel in general without parental supervision.

Have you returned to Germany since?

I have been lucky enough to have returned to Germany several times in the years after my program, and also to have had my host family visit me in Pennsylvania. My host family still refers to “my bedroom” and when I’m back I curl up on the couch eating Erdnussflips with my host sisters and watch German soap operas like no time has passed. There are certainly still things about Germany I don’t understand and words I haven’t learned yet, but CBYX solidified Germany as a second home.

How has having completed CBYX helped you in the years after?

CBYX truly changed my life course, academically and professionally. Seeing an entirely different tax, welfare, and education system in Germany inspired me to study economics in college. I’ve volunteered supporting high school exchange students ever since I returned to the U.S. and have helped choose new generations of CBYXers. Speaking German has connected me with Americans and Germans alike in my city which has been the core source of a lot of my friendships. I also eventually found myself working at the German Embassy, which obviously wouldn’t have been possible without my year living there, the German skills I acquired, and the connections that came out of that. There are people who walk away from CBYX and don’t use their German again or don’t feel the draw to return back to Germany, but if you do choose to keep involved in German relations, CBYX is a very supportive, diverse, and well-connected community.

What advice would you give those applying to or on the program?

The best advice I received was as I was leaving on the airplane. A chaperone told me to “say yes to everything”. This year is a chance to try out a new sport, a new way of talking, a new style, a new way of being--lots of things that wouldn’t be possible or easy back home where everyone knows you. It is a chance to ask questions and expose yourself to new viewpoints. So just say yes. Personally, doing so led me to visiting my first nuclear power plant (I did not know the word for this and said yes anyhow) or to a planetarium show that blasted nothing but Queen (which if you haven’t done before, I highly recommend). I tried cow’s tongue, which is surprisingly delicious on bread, and fell off my bike twice during a community bike tour. I exited my comfort zone more than I stayed in it and came back feeling like I’d lived years within just one. I’d broken outside the bubble of home and gained a new understanding of myself in the process.

If you want more information on applying for CBYX or hosting a student, check it out here: http://www.usagermanyscholarship.org/

[nirah10]

From J,

What you said about siblings having different experiences with their abusive parent really stood out to me as well.

My boyfriend was the suprise baby of the family. His parents had only planned on having two kids, and then years after they thought they were done with children, a little accident happened that resulted in my eventual boyfriend.

Therefore their is quite a big age gap between him and his sisters, despite them all biologically sharing the same mom and dad.

His sisters were 19 and 17 when their mom was murdered, while my boyfriend was 10.

The sisters were too old for foster care, and weren’t old enough to be eligible guardians of their brother either.

So while they were dealing with the this trauma in their late teens, their brother was very much still a child and ended up being moved from foster home to foster home for a couple of years. 

He went through about five foster homes, and then found a permanent one when he was twelve.

His foster parents took him in at 12, and he stayed with them, even as an adult when the fostering runs out, they didn’t force him out (teens getting tossed out of foster homes at 18 with no where to go is a big problem here) but he stayed living with them until he was 20, and had the finances to move out.  He is like a son to them. He is 24 now, and we go to their place for dinner every week. They are two of the most awesome people I have ever known. I love them both. They are pretty cool people.

The sisters don’t really get on well with their brother’s foster’s parents, being 21 and 19 when they met and having to do things the hard way on their own, they were quite hostile to someone trying to ‘claim’ their brother as their family. They saw the foster family as stealing their baby brother and the relationship has always been icy.

Despite this he remains very close with both his foster parents and his siblings, just separately.

(Don’t worry, my boyfriend knows about this post, and is okay with the personal stuff being discussed, we are pretty open with  each other.)

But I told my boyfriend you mentioned your siblings can be a still hostile with your step dad because of how close you are. He was a bit curious and these following questions actually come from him.

Is the hostility jealousy or resentment or protective based? My BF sometimes struggles to get a read on his sisters, and not sure if they are just protective and don’t want him to get hurt by trusting his family to much or if it is a bit of bitterness. I guess it changes how you deal with it, as protective instincts after coming from a tough background is easier to empathize and be patient with.

And has the problems with the step-dad’s closeness to you eased up over the years? Have your siblings become more relaxed? 

For example, his sisters wouldn’t come to a house warming party at our house as his foster parents were there. They came to see us the next day. It really, really upset my boyfriend the next party we had (his birthday) we took his foster parents out for dinner on the night of his actual birthday, so his sisters could come to his party on the weekend. 

We are having friends over on the weekend, and haven’t invited either, mainly because we are unsure of who to invite. Should we just invite both and not tell them? Although that was an awful experience for you when your brother tried to force a meeting between you and your dad as a teen wasn’t it?

Is their a third way we are not seeing?

Also, thanks for your advice and for your repsonse before. I really did appreciate it.

My BF is not really into fanfiction or Doctor Who, but I am a massive fan of your story. Big Harry fan, I find him really calming for some reason. 

Dear J,

It’s hard to say where my siblings’ behaviour comes from exactly, but my best guess is that it is a kind of jealousy. But it’s like it’s a jealousy on behalf of my biological dad? I get the sense that they feel like he’s tried to replace my biological father and he shouldn’t be allowed to. Like, they hate that I don’t visit our father or really have anything good to say about him but I go out of my way to visit my stepdad and think he’s awesome, and I think they feel like maybe I would have a relationship with my biological father if my stepfather wasn’t there (which I would not). One of my sisters, who is normally very kind and accepting, is also super weird about him when it comes to her daughter. My mum and stepdad babysit their (almost) two-year-old several days a week and are a huge part of her life. They adore her and she adores them, often choosing my stepdad over anyone else in the room and running to him with her arms up and a gleeful shriek. But my sister hates that her daughter started calling him Grandpa and corrects her every single time she hears her say it, insisting that she call him by his first name instead. She even told me once when complaining about it, “Dad is her grandpa, not [stepdad]”, which I found to be really messed up because her daughter is adopted and if you’re gonna be a stickler for genes=familial relations then my father is not her grandpa either because my sister isn’t actually her mother (also, most kids have multiple sets of grandparents these days--her husband’s dad has divorced and remarried and that’s no problem). She also reacts poorly to seeing photos of him holding her and would basically prefer that he have no access to her at all. It breaks my stepdad’s heart because he loves my niece so much. I think it’s really cruel and it really disappoints me that my sister, who is normally so loving, would do something like that.

I do kind of suspect that the whole family has some unresolved issues from our intense isolation at young ages. Almost every wedding in the family stirred up significant drama, and pretty much every single one had siblings who refused to show up. One of my sisters got so stressed out from the insane squabbling over her wedding (unfortunately, it was coming from the groom’s family too) that she threw the whole wedding out and got married on the beach with just me, one sister (the other one who is openly not religious), and my mother present. We were the only ones who had actually been properly supportive of her out of the entire family in Canada. It seems that whenever an “other” shows up, there’s a lot of backlash and the family struggles against the change. One brother-in-law was already a family friend and well loved before he married my sister and another brother-in-law was just so damn lovely that we couldn’t help but love him (though my biological father, who hadn’t yet been kicked out, tried very hard to turn everyone against him, even though the best reason he could come up with was that he looked a little effeminate so he must be gay), but the rest were all rejected for a long time. There have been some truly vicious things said and done whenever someone found a new partner and, having never really thought much on it before just now, I think it may be because we had had it drilled into our heads from day one that we shouldn’t interact with the outside world. We weren’t supposed to have friends, never mind actually dating anyone.

Religion also plays a big part, but I think it’s used as an excuse rather than it really being the reason. For example, my brother didn’t go to my other brother or my sister’s wedding because they were marrying people who weren’t baptized Jehovah’s Witnesses (even though both spouses were in the process of studying to be baptized). When my eldest sister, whom he is very close with, was getting married to a man with no interest whatsoever in being a Jehovah’s Witness, he wanted to go to her wedding. He ended up not going but he even said it was only because he hadn’t gone to the other two and it would look bad. So the actual reasoning of not going because of the religious stuff was bullshit, because he would have gone to my sister’s wedding if it didn’t make him a huge hypocrite.

My siblings have become more relaxed over the years, though still not as much as I would like. They will be civil and polite with my stepdad (and my boyfriend too, who was also harshly rejected for years), but it’s still clear that they’d be quite happy if he disappeared. They don’t really want anything to do with him but they will tolerate him and play nice when they see him. One of my older sisters has actually come to realize that they have a lot in common and seems to slowly be building a kind of friendship with him. She has actually come to my parents’ house when I’m there so that the three of us can have movie nights and sometimes brings her kids to my parents’ house to visit (even though my mum is regularly at her home babysitting). My youngest and oldest sisters (the non-religious ones) have always gotten along very well with him and have great relationships with him, but I would very much like to see the others step outside of their own prejudices and give him a real chance too. He’s a really great person and he’s done more for me as a parent than my biological father ever did in the fourteen years he had the opportunity.

As for how to handle your boyfriend’s sisters when it comes to events, it’s hard to say when I don’t know them, but I’ll tell you what I did. My family tried very hard to push my boyfriend out, some of them refusing to go to certain events when they knew he would be there and then blaming me for it, claiming that it was somehow my fault that they were choosing not to go. I basically just didn’t let them blame me. I never tried to trick them. I was always clear when we would both be somewhere and, when they kicked up fuss, I just said that it was their choice. I didn’t make alternative plans to hang out with them separately. The plan was X, we were both going to be there, and, if this person or that person didn’t show up, then that was up to them and we’d just hope they changed their minds.

Most of them quietly accepted that and eventually stopped making the fuss because they realized that I didn’t care and they were only preventing themselves from enjoying events. One sister sent me a bunch of angry texts once saying that she couldn’t believe I was choosing a boy over her own family, blah blah blah. I simply told her that I wasn’t. I was going to see my family and I wanted everyone to be there. If she chose not to come, that simply meant that she was choosing her own stubbornness over her family and there was nothing I could do about it. That was the sister who had to ditch her wedding btw. It really sucked that she had to go through that but she sure sweetened up around my boyfriend quite a lot after getting a taste of her own medicine.

I think with situations like this, guilt is always a huge factor. Your boyfriend’s sisters are trying to guilt him about “tearing the family apart” when that blame is completely misplaced. His father tore the family apart. Likewise, they will try to blame him when they don’t show up for family events, but the truth is that it’s their choice to show up or not. If they don’t come to his birthday or Christmas or whatever family events there might be because his foster parents will be there, then that’s their decision to make and has absolutely nothing to do with your boyfriend. Think of a kid who refuses to eat their vegetables and then complains that they’re hungry. Any (good) parent would tell them that they have a perfectly good meal in front of them and it’s up to them whether they eat or not, and most people would nod and say that makes sense. Kids never really grow up and we all pull the same shit when we’re adults. “I don’t like this so I’m not going to do it and it’s your fault”. Demanding separate gatherings for things like birthday dinners is no different than a child demanding a different dinner because vegetables are gross. In my opinion, that’s just too fucking bad and it’s a take-it-or-leave-it situation. I found that taking on that mentality and being really damn clear about it seemed to embarrass some of my family and I think it made them realize how childish they were being. Trying to guilt someone really doesn’t work when they just laugh and say “What are you talking about? You’re doing it.” It took some time but they all stopped eventually, and the time in between was way less stressful for me.

I hope that helps. And thanks so much ^_^ I’m really glad you enjoy my writing :)