They say, all told, that it’s easier to raise a boy than it is a girl.
Nobody said anything about two boys though…
Nobody said anything about brothers.
I’ve scoured my memory-banks under the sub-headings of ‘real-life’, ‘literature’ and ‘pop culture’, and can only seem to find toxic examples of brotherhood: Cain and Abel, Ronnie and Reggie, Niles and Frasier.
Paul and Barry Chuckle.
About the most innocuous pairing I can think of is Bill and Ben, but even then a) I don’t know if they were even supposed to be brothers, and b) even if they were, they were bouncing plant-pot puppets who said flub-a-dub-a-dib-dob-dib – so that’s not exactly a game-changing chunk of qualitative data.
I’ve got no first-hand experience of having a brother that I can draw upon to help me as a parent. I’m in the dark. I was a brother. Well, I still am a brother, but it’s been almost thirty-years since I last lived under the same roof as my sibling. Also, Ali, my sister, is 8 years older than me, so growing up she was more like a second mother to me – albeit a much, much cooler one – than a sister.
So I guess I don’t have that much proper, conventional sibling experience at all – not in terms of growing up with one, day-to-day, in the same house; especially not with one of a similar age. I’m blind, here… and sometimes, with the things I’ve seen as a parent, I wish I was.
Don’t get me wrong, our two boys – Jack, almost 4; Christopher, 19 months – are capable of generating almost seismic levels of sweetness together; strong enough to trigger a cute-quake in even the withered, hallowed heart of a Home Counties Tory (if the idea of said person having a heart isn’t too much of an oxymoron for you).
Our eldest makes his little brother giggle like something out of a Pampers’ commercial: pulling funny faces, chasing him into and around the garden, and being chased in turn, like they’re trapped in some perpetual, ever-switching Benny Hill chase scene. The little one follows the big one around the house either tottering like a half-drunk penguin, or waddling like a half-pint cowboy who’s been riding on a too-wide horse for too long. It’s absolutely bloody adorable.
Sometimes they sit and play with action figures together, both of them waving the toys about: my eldest constructing elaborate scenarios; his little brother making koosh and badoom and arrggghhhh noises at the times he feels are most appropriate.
At a barbecue recently, Jack used his teeth to cut grapes in two so his little brother could safely eat them. That made us smile. We started to congratulate ourselves on being terrific parents, until we realised that our briefly unsupervised one-year-old could have just as easily choked to death had his brother been in a more experimental mood. That’s what 90 per cent of being a parent is, I suppose: smiling at people in a bid to conceal your very real terror at almost killing your kid again for the 800th time.
In the main, though, they’re good brothers.
They cuddle; they giggle; they wrestle; they kiss.
Sometimes…
Sometimes they do.
…and sometimes they don’t.
Sometimes they can’t be in each other’s company inside the play-room for longer than the time it takes for you to think: ‘I’ll just sit down for five minutes while they’re busy playing, and…’. No sooner have you started to lower your cheeks to the cushion than a shriek slices through the air like a scythe, and either the big one’s thundering out baying for justice because his little brother’s stolen his orange block (and no other colour of block will do, of course. He has to have the orange block, not one of the other 70 blocks, or even another completely different orange block altogether – are you fucking crazy? – the orange one! I want THAT orange one!) or the little one’s galloping out with a blotchy red face, hands held to the heavens, snot and sadness bleeding through his nostrils because his big brother’s just smashed him in the face with a Fisher Price till.
Their behaviour with and towards each other goes from the sublime to the ridiculous almost as often as I resort to hoary old cliches in my writing. For example, the other day I came home to find them fighting over a tissue. Now, if I had a penny for every time I’d caught them fighting over something daft I’d be a millionaire. But a tissue? Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.
“DINE!” shouted Christopher.
“No, it’s mine!” shouted Jack, as it rained confetti over them both. “It’s mine, mine, mine!”
“GUYS!” I shouted, trying to startle them into statues. “Some perspective here, please. What if that was a kidney?”
Then I’d be walking into a sitting-room slaughterhouse, I thought.
I know we ask, and perhaps expect, too much of Jack when it comes to sibling decorum. Is it fair to expect a little boy to be the bigger man, especially when he barely comes up to my belly-button? Yes, Jack does indeed dole out a disproportionate amount of the (mild) violence, but Jack is also held to account most often – even when his little brother does indeed ‘start it’ – purely by virtue of his relative size and maturity: something that makes perfect sense to us as big people, but that Jack doubtless perceives as unfair treatment.
I try to put a positive spin on it for Jack and play to his sense of pride and burgeoning maturity by telling him that he’s almost like a second Dad to Christopher (and maybe that’s me drawing upon the only sibling dynamic of which I’ve had direct experience) and should start acting that way. He usually listens to this speech intently, and a few times I’ve felt like he’s been on the cusp of a Eureka moment, but then he’ll march off and slap his little brother across the head, or pull the cat’s tail or something, and I’ll remember that all little kids are essentially psychopaths and give up.
We were very supportive earlier in the year when little Christopher started taking his first uncertain steps as a fully-fledged member of the bipedal club, and for some reason we imagined Jack would be, too. We really are silly idiots. Christopher would run across the no-man’s land of our living room, falling as if shot first into my arms, and then into his mother’s, gaining more time and distance upright with each passing day. Our cheers filled the room like the end of a Rocky Balboa fight. One particular day Jack was observing stoically from the side-lines, when without any warning whatsoever, just at the apex of a particularly loud cheer, he walked up to his teetering brother and – calmly and perfunctorily – pushed him onto his face, whereupon Christopher’s nose exploded like a fist hammering down on a pouch of ketchup.
Both kids can be kind and sweet with other kids, Jack especially. He’s intuitive and responsive, nurturing and commanding. But then he’s not competing for resources and affection with those other kids. A little jealousy and conflict between siblings seems unavoidable, and entirely normal. The drive to compete and conquer would appear to be hardwired into us – especially us knuckle-dragging penis-wearers.
While the brothers get closer and cosier and calmer with each passing day we’ve taken to giving them a little one-on-one time with each of us a couple of times a week. They still spend the majority of their time together, but this helps them to breathe and be their own wee people – as much as they can be their own wee people while still in the orbit of our influence. Giving them one-on-one time helps us as parents, too, because the already high baseline of parental guilt tends to increase exponentially whenever you have to half or otherwise slash the attention you’re able to give one child due to the different, more immediate needs of one of the others.
Still, what Jack doesn’t realise is that every time he lashes out at Christopher or does something naughty or nasty to him just to see what will happen he’s handing his brother the tools and techniques he needs to eventually defeat him; he’s turning his little brother into the starting-field fighter he never was as a toddler, because Jack never had to contend with a Jack. The health visitors also predict that Christopher’s going to be the bigger of the two brothers.
Simply put? One day his little brother’s going to knock him the fuck out.
The signs are already there. A few months ago they were both in the hallway. Jack strolled up to Christopher with a sneer on his face, and shook him violently by the shoulders, for no reason that any rational mind could deduce. Little Christopher’s face morphed from neutral to enraged, Jack entirely oblivious to his little brother’s living mask of anger as he turned around to walk away. Christopher pulled back a full-body-fist, much like the one George McFly pulled in the seconds before hitting Biff Tannen, and released it, sending him spinning through the air at speed towards the back of his big brother’s head. He rotated 360 degrees with his fist held aloft before losing his balance and thudding bumwards to the ground like a man too drunk to fight. His tiny fist had connected with nothing. Jack was already in a different room, wreaking fresh havoc on inanimate objects. I laughed, but also felt suitably impressed by the little guy’s moxy.
Be kind, Jack, because it’s good to be kind. But also be kind because sometimes it’s the smart thing to do.
My partner and I are going to try for a third baby in the not too-distant future. Are we crazy? And what would be the best – or easiest – addition to the mix? A third boy? Or a little girl?
Maybe we’ll just get another cat.