When one is a child, one lives immersed in the family ambience. For the ones who were lucky, this ambience emanates warm sympathy. Although there might be moments of tension, fights and misunderstanding, family fulfills the basic need of being part of a community; it’s a small group in which one can feel “at home”, where one is known and knows.

Each family has its own characteristic style, which is like a mark of its existence, a style created by its members but certainly mostly imprinted by the parents. Memories of fun time and experiences make the affective richness that nourishes a group from within, and grants it its survival, in spite of the harsh rocks against which relationships are thrown when they fell in the sea of incomprehension.

Family bonds are stronger when the parents blown in the love between them and towards their children. The latter love in the measure the adults love them, for the connection among siblings are mostly defined by the relationship that the parents have with them and with each of them. The family history and the presence, intense or not, of relatives complete the sentimental picture that will give the basement for the construction of the lovely feeling called “having a family”.

But times goes by, children grow, sometimes parents separate; the scenario changes. Even so, the recollections at the root of the identity of each child are unaltered. What have been lived remain like a fold in a clothe that no washing can smooth away. It’s like a scar that doesn’t fade, or a light that doesn’t turn off.

The affective memory shines in the dark bottom of the past and inadvertently one can take it as a still actual reality. However, one soon realizes that it’s not quite so. Not only parents may change through the years and become diverse from the known “dad” and “mom”, but mainly the siblings. These certainly will change.

The relationship between children not always find a place in the adult life, generally marked by totally different destinies. Life options that mysteriously blossomed in each sibling, lead them to unfamiliar paths, like two lines that depart from a common point and advance to the infinite not in parallel, but distancing from each other. It’s surprising how the same parents can give birth to such distinct and sometimes incompatible people. It’s also surprising how siblings who once played together can when adults share nothing of their lives and, as a matter of fact, keep their lives away from one another.

When the distance occurs, sad and apparently ineluctable, there’s always one who suffers more than the other who doesn’t show to care much. The most sensitive, the most affectionate can’t get conformed, including of the sibling’s indifference. But, these are phases of life. Some relations of intimacy and affection last only a period of time to fade away afterwards, even before one feels ready to accept the facts.

Anything passes, and also those deep bonds that hark back to the first years of life. One needs to let them go, not clinging at the childhood experiences, when one believed to love and been loved. As a dream beautifully puts it, it’s necessary to discard the childhood blanket and the pink quilt. Both were, in the dream, thrown away and found in a place for beggars, filthy and stinky.

The childhood blanket is the blanket of the childhood dreams, and the pink quilt reminds that these childhood dreams are also romantic. One as well as the other end up with the beggars, who are the excluded of the system, that’s because any choice implies excluding something from our life. In this case, they are the old bonds of affection and union, which once they are rejected, become nothing more than romantic childhood dreams that, as such, must be discarded.