I have two sisters and one brother. Two of them are what they would call half-siblings, a term I truly detest. It’s like saying we’re almost but not completely related. To me, they are 100%, my siblings and my family. I still remember the day my younger brother, then age 9, came crying to me—I was 19. He was being bullied at school, and made fun of as his classmates chanted, “You have step sisters!” This was Spain almost two decades ago, where divorce and remarriage were still something new and not socially accepted. That reference to step-sisters, based perhaps on the Cinderella story, was a chance to explain to my brother just what family is. I told him that he was in fact, my brother, not my stepbrother because we shared the same father. Despite us having different mothers, we were family and I was proud of it, and him.
