Laravel Return Siblings Results in Non-Object situation

I have a table of users that are imported to the DB. I keep their original id as reference_id:

id    |  reference_id   |   parent_id
1           35                null
2           36                 35
3           37                 35
4           38                null
5           37                 38

I am trying to get back the entire family. In laravel I am using this in the model:

public function getFamily(){
    $parent = User::where('user_id', auth()->id())
    ->where('parent_id', $this->parent_id)->get();

    $children = User::where('user_id', auth()->id())
    ->where('reference_id', $this->parent_id)->get();

    return $parent->merge($children);
}

and then in the blade template calling it like this:

$family= $tasks->user->getFamily();

foreach($family as $member){
    print_r($member->appointments->some_field);
}

I am getting an error when I do the print_r that I am trying to call on a non-object and I am not sure what to do about it. Appointments refers to another model / table.

In the rest of the User model I was able to do it more simply with something like this:

public function getFamily(){
    return $this->hasMany('App\Models\User', 'reference_id', 'parent_id');
        ->where('user_id', auth()->id())
        ->where('parent_id', $this->parent_id);
}

This particular one "should" have returned all the siblings when called like this: $family= $tasks->user->getFamily and then I could have accessed the Appointments Model, but I was getting an error that I was running out of memory trying to use about 1.6Gb:

[2018-02-14 00:25:15] local.ERROR: Symfony\Component\Debug\Exception\FatalErrorException: Allowed memory size of 2634022912 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 1608531968 bytes) in /var/www/html/laravel/storage/framework/views/bcfe7a474602582174256aacc1597a287fcb4e5e.php:213

Is there any way to adapt my first and working function to also allow me to join on associated tables? Barring that, is there something obvious I am missing in the second query?

via Chebli Mohamed