Nightmare on Chauncy Street

Siblings, conflict, and whether there's any point in trying...

When we were little, my older brother Ben programmed a computer game called “Nightmare on Chauncy Street” where the ultimate boss was a monster named “Sarah” that awoke when you walked past its bedroom and gobbled at you like a turkey until it ate you. The only way to beat Sarah was to gobble back, because she “couldn’t take a taste of her own medicine.”

Was I really the King Koopa of our large, exacting family? Most likely. I had a lot of “big feelings” as a child, and doled out screams, bites and scratches, often with impunity. Ben responded with his own tools, complicated psychological punishments worthy of a Sherlock Holmes villain. He would often point out the scientific improbability of my claims, such as that “nothing was fair,” until I was provoked to violence (braun over brains baby!). It got so bad that at one point, my mom was paying Ben a dollar for every morning that he did not fight with me before school (we’re talking like a 90 minute period here, not even as long as a Judd Apatow movie).

Under the big umbrella of “parenting things I know I should have expected but I still don’t think I have the capacity to tolerate” is the timeless topic of sibling rivalry. Sibling discord, endless bickering, reputation-damaging through a game played on a Mac SE, whatever you want to call it. If you have more than one kid, it’s in your home too. And if it isn’t, as A. Ham. says, just you wait. In our house, our kids have been doing this dope fun thing where they just yell “my mamma!” louder and louder at one another. I remember my sister, whose kids are kind of the best friends you could ever wish siblings to be, still remarking that her memoir about having a second child would be entitled “No mama, hug me with BOTH ARMS!”

This is the actual document my mom pasted all over our apartment like 20 years ago. The last part is my favorite. Also the phrase “loss of freedom.”

Like many parenting challenges, my first line of defense is lowering my expectations and reducing my self-pity. Why do siblings fight? Sure, it can have to do with things we do or don’t do as parents (see below), but first and foremost, it’s because siblings are people. People who live together, share bathrooms and parents and iPads and bowls of Pirate’s Booty. Relationships are hard (my poor husband even has to sleep in the same friggin’ bed as me!). They’re so hard that some people just opt out of them altogether. Fighting amongst siblings should be expected. This fact doesn’t make it any less annoying, does not relieve the outrage I feel when their wee voices ring out in discord from the kitchen when I am just trying to PEE BY MYSELF FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. But it is true. There is no clause we signed before a sexy night with our partner or an even sexier trip to the fertility clinic or adoption agency that grants us a conflict free home with our offspring. No siree.

After I accept, even some of the time, that this conflict is normal, predictable, and unavoidable, is there still room for some way to deal with it that’s an improvement on my current practice of telling my son “yes your sister is an asshole, but she’s younger so suck it up dude” 30 times a day, hiding in the shower, or yelling “I can’t even with you two bozos!” and collapsing on the bed? I am skeptical.

Luckily, when you work with kids, you have a lot of parenting books on your shelves. Unluckily, if you live inside my brain all the time, you have not been able to make it through the first five pages of any of these books because they are a) reductionist, b) ableist (“you can make your kids have no issues and that’s how you’ll know you and your kids are perfect!”) or c) just so. damn. long. and should mostly just be articles.

Honest-to-god-not-staged photo of my two-year-old, who took this off of my shelf, called it “my book” and wouldn’t let go of it for a whole day. Please tell what it says baby.

In an act of courage, I picked up Siblings Without Rivalry, a book by How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk people Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. My mom had recommended it to me a while back, and also these ladies sound like friends of my moms, so how bad could it be? The book is sweet. These two mostly don’t position themselves as experts, and instead process the issues through transcripts of discussion groups with real parents, which normalizes the challenges and puts the expertise back in the hands of the people. I still give the side-eye to any parenting book written by middle-class white people, for reasons described here, but this one is trying to be inclusive in its way.

This is the impression I got from skimming the first page of several chapters, feeling my brain explode with boredom, and finding, gratefully, the lovely comics they include to summarize their main do’s and don’t’s (again, all we needed were the comics, but you can’t charge 15.95 for those), and reading this quickie of a blog post on the book, complete with a (hallelujah!!!) infographic.

Are there NOT busy parents? Good looks on this, though.

I do find this visual helpful. Mostly for reminding me to let my kids work their shit out themselves as much as possible. It represents one culture of parenting, the one I grew up in, but some part of it might work for many different kinds of people. One thing that is often missing from this kind of literature is the parents needs. Liberal, whitish, middle-class parenting philosophies often focus on letting the child’s spirits flourish at the expense of the parent’s. The goal, as I see it, is not to have some child from a Walgreens Picture frame that doesn’t ever bother you (again, watch those ones when they get older), but to be people with limits and thresholds who also need to pee by themselves in peace. I do think it is valuable to acknowledge in front of my children that I am exhausted by their bickering and that I do not have unlimited patience and energy for it. In our family, I talk a lot about my “battery level,” and how, for example, if the kids fight the whole way to the park (just kidding, we don’t go to those ghost towns for children’s dreams anymore!), I will have very little battery left to play with them. I realize this is all still about me as a parent, and I could do more of explaining that I also need my battery to write, and be a friend, and make 90’s slow jams playlists on Spotify, and be a person independent of them. I’ll work on that.

In case you’re interested, my brother Ben and I have been great friends for many years, really as soon as we weren’t living under the same roof anymore. We are, no surprise, very similar in many ways, and as adults that has worked out quite nicely. I count him among my best friends, and I have not scratched him with what were once referred to, surely with some respect, as my “talons of doom” in a long, long time. I don’t really think I believe in the idea of siblings without rivalry, just as I don’t believe in love without pain or two bottles of wine without a hangover. But I do believe in time, and creativity, and kindness and forgiveness, and relationships, as difficult as they can be.

Gobble gobble, muthafuckas!

Note: Thank you to the reader who suggested this topic, you know who you are. If you have other themes, questions, or just shoot to shit, please email me. I am looking for reasons to be away from my family!