Thank you, Mom and Dad.

My siblings are my best friends. Pedro, Teresa, Joana (me), Miana, João, Marta, Madalena, Inês and António. One boy, three girls, one boy, three girls, one boy. Perfect.

I grew up thinking that a large family was my parents' calling, as if it were an extension of their love, joy, affection, imagination, solidarity and enormous tenderness and gratitude for life. And that they would have as many children as they could, from a health and organizational point of view.

Yes, it was confusing at times. My mother says that at the table I would sometimes grab my head, lamenting the confusion and noise. Yes – today more than ever – it is often impossible to have a conversation with an Aries for more than two minutes without their attention being diverted elsewhere. Yes, at a table where everyone is seated, there are times when one is already eating the fruit while the others are still picking up the soup spoon. Yes, when we watch a film and burst out laughing in unison at times when no one else is, outsiders get the feeling that we are a kind of clan that laughs at the same things without really understanding why, that looks at each other with complicity without having to explain why, that speaks in the same way, that values ​​the same things.

But I also have the feeling that those who look from the outside first feel the love, harmony and a constant desire to be together. When I am distressed, everyone's expression stops. My brothers always tell me that I am beautiful, that I am strong, that I am capable, that I have to trust, even when I feel weak, incapable and incompetent. In the worst times of my life – especially before I was lucky enough to create our family with my husband – at the end of each day, I always had more to be thankful for than to ask for.

I told my mother that I still had a lot of joy inside me. This joy did not come from me, but from the purity and unconditional love I felt in my family, like the feeling that the essential, what is truly most important in life, remained. As if my family was the only certain thing I would have throughout my life, a certainty cemented in millions of small moments of attention, tenderness, affection, presence and love.

After 50 years, I am blessed to grow up and grow old with my best friends. As adults, we still have each other, more than ever.

When we were all little, the older ones shamelessly helped and ordered the younger ones around, as if in a hierarchy. The fifteen-year age difference between the oldest and the youngest is smaller today. My younger siblings are often the ones who listen to me, feel for me, help me and teach me how to be a better mother, aunt, daughter and sister. Forty years ago, the older ones were the leaders. Today it is often the other way around.

There are few things as good as when people confuse me with my sisters, not only because I love and admire them, but because they are (many of them) younger and (all) prettier than me. A few years ago, at a certain point, it happened so much that I stopped correcting people who called me out.

I once heard the inspirational Fernando Castro say something like: “A great gift we can give a child is a brother. The best gift we can give him is many brothers.”

My heart warms and my eyes fill with tears when I imagine my parents, more than 50 years ago, writing a list with fifteen girl's names and fifteen boy's names.

On Siblings' Day, May 31st, I can only say thank you.

Thank you, Mom and Dad.