Tag Archives: strategy

It’s awful when your kids fight; it’s worse when they don’t

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When Christopher, our second child, was still wibbling about in his mother’s yolk, a fish-faced lump of stubby proto-limbs, our first-born, Jack, was already manifesting signs of fraternal protectiveness. He’d rub his mummy’s tummy and tell us how much he was looking forward to his baby brother joining the family. This reassured us, even though he was clearly just parroting back at us the many words of enthusiasm and encouragement we’d chirped into his ears.

In the beginning, things were great. Jack doted on his baby brother, and seemed to harbour zero resentment towards the little guy for jumping on his being-born bandwagon. I know ill feelings and jealous reactions don’t always manifest themselves straight away, but I know they can because of my sister. When I was born, my then eight-year-old sister didn’t shit for a month. The child psychologist said her wildly conflicting feelings of love, anger and jealousy were playing havoc with her insides. She was bottling things up, physically as well as mentally. In a weird sort of a way, the shit she stubbornly refused to release represented her love for me. Love won, in the end. As it always does. I guess you could say I literally loved the shit out of her.

My partner and I realised, as Christopher developed more and more autonomy, that it had probably been easy for Jack to love his brother when he was nothing more than a tiny creature who spent his days either asleep or variously shitting and screaming, because there was no competition between them. Sure, there was competition for time and attention at a basic level, but we always strived to mitigate Jack’s ill-feelings as best we could by giving him plenty of one-on-one time with each of us, not to mention oodles of cuddles with his brother. We wanted Jack to see his brother as a part of him, and a part of the family. An addition, an enhancement, not a replacement.

And it was a success. Maybe Jack wasn’t considered the cutest kid on the block any more, and maybe the greatest share of the ooos, aaaaaaaas and cooooooos now went to Christopher, but Jack was still king. A ruler of absolute power, at least as far as the Kingdom of Little People was concerned. And if the going got rough? If Jack grew tired of this wide-eyed, swaddled little jester? He could simply walk away, go someplace else, be by himself… with brother, no brother, with brother, no brother, as quick and easy as an optician replacing lenses in those weird Meccano glasses they put on your face at the eye test… better with, better without, with brother, no brother. The best of both worlds.

Unfortunately for Jack, Christopher became mobile, and discovered that he didn’t have to live life passively like a leaf on a river. He could be the river. At least until he learned how to be a boat… I’ve really lost the thread of this multi-part metaphor, haven’t I? And why didn’t I say ‘flow’ instead of ‘thread’? This is what happens to your mind when you spend the better part of a year shouting endless variations of ‘LEAVE HIM ALONE!’, ‘LEAVE EACH OTHER ALONE’ and ‘STOP FIGHTING’ at the future WWE stars your children have become.

Christopher, although absolutely bloody adorable, is fearless for his size. He’s always ready and able with a hoarse rebuke or a swinging slap. Thanks to Jack’s campaign of brutal dominance, Christopher learned to fight back at an incredibly early age. He’s a honed, toned battle-machine in a way that Jack never was, or needed to be. If Christopher is occasionally a little monster, then he’s a monster of Jack’s creation [nothing to do with us, you understand, we’re just the parents].

That’s not to make the mistake of assuming that Jack is now the helpless victim in the face of his brother’s revenge-based brutality. Just the other month we heard Christopher screaming, and ran upstairs to find a chunk of his hair matted with blood. Jack had clonked Chrissy over the head with a bulky Chief Wiggum toy, not realising that the sharp points of the policeman’s hat made him more of a blade than a chib.

Different numbers of siblings, and different combinations of genders and ages, make for wildly different sibling relationships. A young girl rounding off a squad of elder brothers might become a tomboy (I hope it isn’t now considered a hate crime to use that word); a young boy at the end of a big litter of sisters might find himself traumatised for all the rest of his days, god help him.

My sister’s role and status as related to me shifted with age, mood and circumstance. Sometimes she was my protector, sometimes my aggressor. Sometimes she was a second-mother, sometimes she was a mother-fucker. But everything was built on a bedrock of love. For every act of torment there came a larger act of kindness. She may have told me there were dead flies in my sandwich to make me hand it over to her, or occasionally bent my legs over my stomach and attempted to pin them behind my head, causing pain that was suggestive of a particularly gruesome interrogation by the Spanish Inquisition, but she also took the rap for me. Hid things for me. Stood up for me. Absorbed the strikes of lightning for me.

When I threw a pillow and broke a bendy, retractable ceiling light of which my mum was especially proud, Alison took the blame. When I was struck with the crippling fear of death, frightened and sobbing, it was her bed I crawled into for peace and reassurance. So I can forgive her for teaching me how to do the fingers and then sending me off to show mum, who went predictably apoplectic.

Siblings fight, siblings grass, sneer and prank, but they love. At least in my experience. (Love you, sis)

Jack and Christopher’s age gap isn’t sufficient to make a second-tier father out of Jack, but their relationship is definitely changing, evolving, growing – away from violence and towards something else entirely. Something great, but something terrible, too. Our greatest hopes for a loving, peaceful union between the two brothers are in the process of being made reality, but it’s a boon that carries barbs. What I’m trying to say is: they’re joining forces.

While whirlwinds of fists and kicks still occasionally erupt from them with the barest of warnings increasingly they’re a team – though not always one where its members enjoy equal standing. Predictably, Jack is the puppet-master. He’s realised the esteem he’s held in by his brother, and the influence this affords him. The fine-print of their accord is less like ‘Why fight, when we can embrace fraternal harmony?’ and more like ‘Why fight, when this pliant young whippersnapper can be the willing and able instrument for my evil bidding?’ They’re like Batman and Robin… if Batman was a total shit.

Jack now wants his little brother to share bedtime stories with him, to lie like best buds and greet the world of sleep together. We often walk past to find Jack whispering in his brother’s ear, usually thinks like ‘Get the pencil and draw on that wall’ or ‘Go slap mummy’s bum’, but, you know, as far as conspiracies go, it’s incredibly sweet.

Last week we’d asked the boys to go upstairs and tidy their room. We knew the chances of them actually tidying their room were a million to one, but – cards on the table – we just wanted ten minutes’ peace. While I expected the room to be actually slightly messier at the end of those ten short minutes, what I didn’t expect when I went to check on their progress was to find water pooling on the floors and carpets, dripping down the walls, and running down the light-bulb and lampshade of the hall light. Christopher stood in the upstairs hall with a giant pump-action water-pistol, his clothes soaking wet, as Jack retreated from his ear with a big goofy grin on his face.

What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, and they decide to be best pals? I’m sure we’re going to spend the next fifteen years praying for a return to war.

Herding Sharks: Dealing with Warring Kids

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When you get a tinge of diarrhoea you know what you’re in for: frequent trips back and forth to the toilet (often with little or no warning); skid-marks ahoy; the feeling of being drained, dehydrated and defeated, and the involuntary commitment to time spent nursing a thoroughly grotty botty. It’s okay, though. After a day or two of discomfort your poor, stinging bum-hole and over-worked digestive system will return to normal. You know this. You accept it.

But knowing this and accepting it doesn’t mean that diarrhoea suddenly becomes an enjoyable activity. ‘Ooh, a gurgle in my stomach. Is it a fart or is it a jet-stream of shit? I just can’t tell. I LOVE THIS, IT’S SO EXCITING!’

And so it is with our off-spring (Yes, Doctor Spock, I’ve just compared my children to a messy bout of shitting – what does your book say about that?)

When our children hit a developmental milestone and begin exhibiting a new set of challenging behaviours you know that before too long (it always feels too long, however long it takes) their brain will knit itself into a different pattern and their capacity for reason, empathy and self-awareness will alter, increase, and evolve, ultimately leaving you with happy, likeable kids who don’t make you want to leap out of an airplane using only a bottle of vodka as a parachute.

While you’re dealing with the worst that your kids have to throw at you, it pays to remember that those tiny beings who push our buttons so expertly aren’t wise agents with full control over their own minds and destinies, but frightened, foolish, fun-loving little proto-people, who spend their days rushing and rocketing between sensations, agonies and epiphanies, all the while as their fragile bodies morph and spin and sprout and change, seemingly at the speed of a Tasmanian devil that’s perpetually stuck on fast-forward.

Unfortunately – as with the squits – realising all of this doesn’t make the minutiae of their madness any easier to handle, no matter how many times you count to ten through gritted teeth, or chant ‘gentle parenting, gentle parenting’ to yourself as you crush a Pyrex jug to dust with your bare hands.

If you’ve got two kids of roughly similar age, then God help you (If you’ve got more than two, you absolute psycho, then I can’t help you. No-one can. You’re doomed… DOOOOOMED). Just as one child is coming out of a developmental cycle – new and improved, perhaps even temporarily tamed – the other one’s usually just about to enter one – at the new end, the bad end – their challenging behaviour rubbing off on the other one, the bigger one, who had looked for one precious, fleeting second as if they’d actually turned over a new leaf.

Nope.

And round they both go, around and around, again and again, shitting their destruction over your soul like a pair of possessed muck-spreaders.

It’s incredibly difficult to negotiate with these tiny terrorists. They want different things from you, and from each other. By way of example, our boys are 4 and 2. Their communications arrays are at very different stages of construction. Our eldest can pick up and decode most of the transmissions we send to him, but there are some that transmit on too low a frequency for him to catch. And, distressingly, a high proportion of the signals that do manage to get through to him are drowned out by a rogue signal being beamed from within his own brain, which appears to be amplified by tiny and invisible but none-the-less immensely powerful loud-speakers dotted around his skull. This is the message:

‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGHHHHH!’

Our youngest picks up very little of the instructions we transmit to him. If he obeys, it’s mostly just luck. Next to negotiating with a two-year-old, herding cats is easy. Trying to reason with small children is more like herding hungry sharks.

The signals the two kids broadcast to each other are always scrambled. They spend most of their time scrutinising each other like drunk submarine commanders from rival warring countries, bunkered down under the sea and cut off from their respective governments, both with their fingers poised over the Nuclear Destruct button, unsure whether the other one has already pressed theirs.

Looking after two is tough. Hell, looking after one is tough. The bad news is, you can’t always seek strength in numbers. Sometimes you can be outnumbered by your off-spring even if there’s a balanced ratio between adult and child. The chaotic unpredictability of a child enhances its destructive power far out of proportion to its size. For some kids, you might need as many as twelve adults to keep them in check, and quite possibly a Hannibal Lecter-style prison-trolley and muzzle.

My two bonnie boys – Jamie

Last autumn, my partner and I took our two boisterous boys to the Museum of Scotland, in Edinburgh; by the end of the excursion their mother bore a striking physical resemblance to many of the angry jungle cats whose mouths were frozen in fury along the walls. The kids fought, they fled, they fought some more; they bashed, they bickered, and bounced; they hurled food on the floor, and hurled themselves at strangers, nearly knocking over a multitude of exhibits in the process. They shrieked and yelled and leaked and raged, fighting to the death for a spot on my high shoulders.

Having to shout the same clutch of stock phrases over and over tends to take the fizz out of a day of fun and cultural enrichment. Towards the end of the day I genuinely shouted the following at my four-year-old son: ‘You walk one more step away from me and I swear you can kiss the car we’re saving up to get you when you’re 17 goodbye!’ Now that’s some next-level consequencing.

I’ve been driving my partner to the gym two nights a week, and, brave fool that I am, spending the hour between drop-off and pick-up entertaining the kids in town: one evening taking them to the pet shop (or ‘The Free Zoo’, as I like to call it), the next evening to McDonalds, another evening to the furniture shop (or the Free Funfair, as I like to call it), where we can bounce on the display beds and ride up and down on the escalators.

Sometimes necessity dictates that we go shopping, a prospect I rarely relish in tandem with my partner, never mind alone. If you’re a lone parent taking multiple children with you to the supermarket to do the shopping, you’re either a little bit crazy or really, really, really fucking crazy.

There’s a double-decker shopping trolley in the big Tesco in town that’s trolley on top, plastic toy-car on bottom. Naturally, my kids fight over who gets to sit behind the wheel of the car. Yet again, the myriad faults in our shared communication matrix make negotiation almost impossible. Even when the intellectual conditions are ripe for striking a deal with my eldest – “If you sacrifice this for your brother, I promise I’ll reward you with x,”; “Remember, he doesn’t understand things as well as you do, and gets a lot more upset at things, so we have to help him a lot more,” – if his sleep/mood/sugar balance is off by even twenty minutes or a lolly-pop then, shit, I might as well try to mediate the Israel-Palestine conflict dressed as a naked Hindu God, covered in makeshift Hitler and Allah tattoos.

During a particularly memorable trip a few weeks ago I almost voluntarily committed myself to (not a mental institution, but) the sea. The mighty ocean. The younger kid screamed for the car at the base of the trolley. The eldest kid screamed because he wanted the car. I figured the screams of the eldest would be easier to bear, so gave the youngest kid the car. The eldest kid wouldn’t stop screaming, so I wheeled the trolley back to where it came from, and ordered them both out. Then I had two screaming kids. But at least their misery had been equalised, even if it was at the cost of doubling mine.

The screaming died down. Eventually. But the screams weren’t gone, merely dormant, lurking just beneath the surface of reality waiting for the smallest of ‘nos’ or ‘stop its’ to invite them back into the world. The youngest wanted to run rampant round the store. Very understandably, I didn’t want him to do that. He objected, in very strong terms, which he conveyed through an electrified flood of tears and tantrums. I had to jog through the shop holding him under my arm, a horizontal lump wriggling and shouting to get free as my eldest kid jogged by our side. We must have looked like a fractured squad of injured soldiers running through a battlefield to the evac point.

Upon reaching the check-out and loading the conveyor, my eldest announced he was desperate for the toilet. I angrily threw the groceries back into the basket, and rushed us off to the bathroom, whereupon my youngest splashed and patted his hands in a dirty urinal as I was holding his brother up to pee in the urinal next to it.

That was a dark day.

But the next week, something magical happened in that supermarket: nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing stressful, in any case. The kids were little miracles of civility: polite, responsive, calm, cute and courteous. My youngest took the car, but the eldest didn’t mind. He rode in the trolley above, helping to pack the groceries, and proving an able navigator. I wanted to show them off to the world. Behold! Look what models of citizenhood shot from my loins! High-five me, peasants, for I am surely the greatest Dad in the world.

Bouyed by this experience, the next week, apropos of nothing, I decided to take them both out for dinner at a restaurant that DIDN’T have a soft-play. Such arrogance deserved to be punished. But it wasn’t. They were a dream. At one point they even sat on the same chair peacefully feeding each other. I couldn’t quite believe it myself.

So does that mean that the cycles are complete? That the worst is over, and they’re now running in concert with each other, working together as a beautiful, harmonious unit?

I got this text from my partner during the week:

“You’d think that the extra half hour in bed would make them better people! Normally Chris just putters about doing his own thing and is generally pleasant but even he was a bit of a dick today. He kept throwing his hat into people’s gardens. I visualised throwing him over the wall after it.”

And I’m writing this post you’re reading now while sitting in my local coffee shop, half-frazzled and surely suffering from mild PTSD after shouting ‘Don’t hit your brother, don’t hit your brother’ at least 60,000 times this morning alone. I’m on my second large coffee of the day. It won’t be the last.

The cycle never ends, my friends. It just mutates.

Different shit, different day.

Just keep dashing, wiping and washing. That’s all you can do.

But don’t forget – if you’ll allow me to refer back to the diarrhoea analogy with which we began – to enjoy the moments between the gurgles and the rumbles and the worried checking of your pants.

Those moments make all the shit worthwhile.