Brotherly Love

I understand from my own experience growing up, brothers and sisters have a dog cat relationship. There may be siblings out there who regard each other with mutual respect, but most of my own life, children see the pecking order, and if they're lower down, they want higher up. If they're higher up, they want to keep everyone else lower down.

Son A wants eggs. Son B owns a skillet.  He refuses to share. I agree, his skillet, his rules.  He (Skillet boy), then offers to help Son A, but only if he's allowed to cook.  Son A refuses.  Son B in an odd show of charity, gets out the ingredients, the butter and as he calls it, the older carton of eggs.  His brother should ONLY use the older carton. He explains to me that I really shouldn't let Son A cook.  I ignore.  He suggest Son A will get hurt.  I ignore again.  Son A gets out the other skillet and cuts some butter. I sense a trap.  The four eggs in the carton are hard boiled...like Skillet Boy's heart.  I consider switching the eggs to pull one over on Son B but opt to get out the proper eggs instead and tell Son B, if he complains about his brother again, he's going to lose out on all the not hard boiled eggs.  

When the sole goal is to make sure you look good or at least better than your brother or sister, even virtue becomes a battlefield.   "I did the dishes."  Sister says.

"Oh yeah?"  Brother turns, scheming, how to come out smelling better, "Well, I agreed to clean the basement."  That works the first time it's tried, but after that, everyone knows it's put up or shut up, promises don't count.  

So you get minute by minute up to the second updates of how kid A is doing so much more work than  Kid B that really, you should just pack Kid B up for someone else's home, or you should send Kid A out to a hammock, bring him a fifteen foot meatball sub and a soda and make Kid B work sun up to sundown until the age of sixty-five.

Corrective measures, even well meant at the start, become fighting grounds for proving one's greatness as versus the other.  "Pick up the markers..." one child barked.  "They're not mine." the other countered and continued making an illustration on a dry erase board.  "They're under your chair." He pointed.

"So? I'm drawing."  She explained they weren't dry erase markers so it wasn't her problem.  He picked them up but not before erasing the head off her drawing.   Having to calm a daughter's irritation at his willful desecration of her artwork, I did fire off a warning to both.

"See the task, be the task." and "It's no virtue to destroy someone's emotional mood because they don't do what you say."   "But Mom, the markers would have dried out."

"So you wouldn't pick them up to prevent that from happening?"
Cue silence.  

No one it seems, is more interested in protecting the actual markers than proving they're the more virtuous person of good intentions.

So when my daughter opted to make cup cakes and said brother wanted to help decorate, I had reservations.   Since he doesn't eat frosting, why would he want to put frosting on the cupcakes?

So the man boy could custom make the desserts and let us all know his true feelings for his sister. Each of the cupcakes had a frowny face  like this:  :(     Alternatively, they had a tongue sticking out like this:   :p   and lastly, in case we somehow missed the point of his efforts, one cupcake had "X's" for the eyes, indicating the face was dead.

But I've promised parity.  His sister will get to frost the cupcakes for his birthday which is coming up.  I foresee a lot of pink glitter and sparkles in his future.  Should be a memorable party.

Olympus as you never knew it...

When we only had two, of course we spent a lot of time inventing nick names for our young prodigy. They were wonderful, these two, Apollo and Athena. Why Greek gods? We thought them that promising and enjoyed the compare and contrast of their temperaments that such names allowed. And besides, we were comic book collecting, RPG playing, LOTR loving star trek watching geeks –this is what geeks do.

Apollo, god of music and light and reason, of course fit our gentle son’s personality. He was not a fighter, at least not with his fists.

Athena, pensive, tempermental and seemingly low maintenance until displeased, helped us to create our favorite phrase for describing her, like a goddess, easily amused, but also like a goddess, more easily perturbed. She also had her father’s heart wrapped around his finger.

Then Artemis showed up, and a cloud shadowed Athena’s face for a time. I have to share Dad? This is so wrong. While Apollo shined on…benevolently looking after his two sisters and indulging their daily competitions with each other –you know…girls. Artemis was also inscrutable, she'd be sweet and easy going one minute, and shut down another. She loved Athena but also loved driving her nuts by squirreling away time with Zeus. How come I never get fought over? Apollo remained unbothered by this sisterly rivalry. He’d roll his eyes with the smug knowledge of understanding that only a five year old could muster.

Then Hermes showed up. From the get go, he lived up to his Greek namesake, driving his older brother quite mad. He disassembled Lego models that had stood for years, made deals with his brother to not touch magic card decks in return for additional allowance, (yes a two year old can run an extortion racket, or at least this one did). He ran around the house at lightning speed, screaming to the point of inducing panic, causing his mother to ponder whether he was in fact the god of Nature rather than the swift footed glib brother of Apollo.

Alas, such were the golden days of Olympus

Hermes’ next sister showed up and he didn’t forgive us until a brother showed up two years later. Apollo actually thought this was great and regularly pointed out that “the replacement baby” had shown up because Hermes was so uncooperative. Zeus and I had to intervene. With her endless love of all things sparkly, pink, girlish and pretty, no one had any doubt who this blonde blue eyed goddess was. She got a glimpse of the ocean at the tender age of 1. The money quote sealed her as having been born of the water. “Mine.” Arms outstretched in a sign of hugging the whole Atlantic. Aphrodite claimed her title.

The next son, we struggled to name to continue the template. We hadn’t thought this far. Ares, Poseidon, and Hades, none of them seemed appropriate or terribly desirable. Bacchus also struck a wrong note. Fortunately, our son solved the problem for us by becoming addicted to the Disney video that became his Greek god name. The only problem was, when I read him the actual story of Hercules, he demanded to know “Where Pegasus was?” and telling him that Pegasus belonged to a different Greek hero of mythology didn’t satisfy.

With the birth of our next two daughters, the structure began to break down. We were out of goddesses that fit our daughter’s temperaments. Demeter? No, she’s mine. Hestia? No, that was mine too. Hera? Also mine. (Trust me, I need the harvest, hearth and wrath of three goddesses to get through the day), and the left over demi-goddesses were limited in appeal. Eris –goddess of discord? Thanks, no. Nike, spirit of Victory –debatable as to the gender. Persephone –raped and carried to the underground …ew…no. Helen of Troy, Penelope? What to do…and then…as before, the children solved it for us.

The two year old cupie doll came to discover her inner goddess name –the other day, in the early hours of the morning, she awakened. She went downstairs to the kitchen. After emptying the Cinnamon toast crunch and dancing the flakes into the floor, she channeled other artistic muses and scribbled on four walls using red marker, and filled in the window pane on the front door with black. Hungry from her artistic endeavors, she opened the freezer and got out the ice cream and had that for an early breakfast all before waking us up by pushing the panic button on my car keys.

Loki anyone?

The baby still needs to discover her moniker, but honestly, I’m not in any real hurry.

P.S. sorry this is a day late, but yesterday I did taxes, so by the end of the day, nothing was funny. For less taxing humor, try www.humor-blogs.com!