Growing (UP) together

When growing up together, siblings are inseparably tied to each other – whether they like it or not. During their childhood, they experience their relationships most intensively. For me growing up without my five siblings would have been unimaginable. When I became a mother myself for the first time, it was a great desire that my daughter would also have the chance to experience "growing up together". Brothers and sisters usually know each other better than anyone else and often support each other for life. But what used to be so natural for me as a child, became more and more special to me as a grown-up: after a few miscarriages and a couple of years of seeming infertility it wasn't easy to explain to my daughter why she would probably be an only child. However, her childlike desire for a brother or sister was tremendously huge. And thus, Mila told me one morning when I came out of the shower, "Mummy, do you know that there is a baby in your belly?" My husband and I had already given up all hope, but in her childish sensitivity, Mila noticed my pregnancy with her brother Yuri in the first weeks. Yuri was born in our home in Rome the night before Mila's sixth birthday. When she first saw him, she only said: "Finally you are here! Now we are the two of us!" "Growing (UP) together" is a personal long term project about the joint growing up of my two children Mila and Yuri, and their relationship with each other as sister and brother. However, their relationship will be evolving, and it might be one of the most valuable sources for strength and support in their adult life.