Sibling Rivalries

Our extended family is having some issues.

Jerk.

I promise that I have no intention of turning this newsletter into a catblog, but Eleanor and Lucy are squabbling intensely at present and I cannot get them to stop. I now understand how my mother must have felt. She gave birth to three special, willful flowers who spent most of their young childhoods at each other’s throats. Like for so many kids, in our brood it was mostly a competition for resources combined with some garden variety sadism.

As soon as my older brother was born, my father claimed him, and transformed the helpless babe into his narcissistic supply. My mother could not break into that dyad. Luckily, they always wanted four kids, a nice round number, so that each kid would have someone to pair off with. I came next and became my mother’s precious one. Where my brother could do no wrong in my father’s eyes, the same was true for my mother and me. Meanwhile, my brother felt like he didn’t get enough from my mother when he was little, and much of my terrible history with romantic relationships can be traced back to my father’s early neglect of me. My parents did their best, it’s just how it shook out.

I’m sure we would have found plenty of reasons to fight on our own, but our budding sibling dynamic wasn’t helped by being pawns in a cold proxy war. Then my sister came along, assigned to no one. As my parents’ relationship had deteriorated to the point that a fourth child was out of the question, my younger sister remained the odd one out.

The best laid plans…

Even if unintentional, triangles are never ideal. Around and around we went, two against one with varying makeup. After my parents divorced, and my mother started working full time as my father went off to follow his bliss trading commodities and learning astrology, our kid fights became the stuff of legend.

We fought over food portions and TV programming, over who might have breathed wrong or dared to like something unusual. Or didn’t like something unusual but the others pretended they did and then tortured them over it. One time, when I was about eight, my brother, then around ten, came up behind me and smashed a juicy, squishy, bright pink wad of pre-chewed gum in my hair for absolutely no reason. I jumped up, ran to the knife drawer, grabbed a full-sized meat cleaver and chased him around the house with it. He ran into the bathroom, which had louvered doors, so I slid the meat cleaver in through the slats, poking at the air, doing my best to imitate a horror movie I had never seen. When nothing happened other than my brother standing far out of the way laughing at me, I roundhouse kicked the bathroom door in. My mother came home, combed out the gum with peanut butter and told me I was going to have to pay for the door.

My sister got an unfortunate pixie haircut, and not only did I cackle in her face over it, I invented an entire elaborate, terrible personality around it, and taunted her with it for years. Years. My brother and I snatched my sister’s stuffed Snoopy one afternoon while killing time unsupervised at my dad’s law office—the 70s were great!—dipped its legs in stale office kitchen coffee, and chased my sister around with it shrieking, “Coffee legs! Coffee legs!” Eager to improve our innovation, when we got home, we froze the doll’s wilted, stained, sad little legs, took it out to the street in front of our mother’s house and smashed the limbs into shards with a hammer. My sister got the worst of it by far, but my brother was quick to beat the shit out of me as well.

Long story: my mother and we three were randomly cast in this photo shoot. That man is not my father, and the bruises on my mother’s face are makeup. The “New Age Dads” coverline has some truck with reality but only by happenstance. Mostly this photo is an ode to the power of a bowl cut.

Our mother was trying to keep us housed and fed as a freelance interior designer, so she resorted to the only peacemaking technique she could think of, other than just walking out the door and driving her car around the block. “Write me a note,” she would yell, and then slam her office door shut to resume whatever detail-heavy phone meeting she was trying to conduct with a client who didn’t care that her children were slowly eating away at her sanity.