28/30: sibling relationships and rivalries, age gaps and identities
Wondering why my sons are finding it so hard to get along with each other at the moment and thinking about my relationship with my brother.
“They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.” (Zadie Smith, On Beauty)
I’ve been thinking a lot about sibling relationships recently. Me and my brother, my two sons, my mum and her sisters. I began with the quote from On Beauty by Zadie Smith because it doesn’t match my experience at all. There’s a five year age gap between my brother and me, and we always have something to say to each other. I’ll admit there are some topics that we tend to avoid (romantic relationships, money, jobs) but as siblings go, we’re close. By and large we get on well, and we always have done. Dad always used to say that we met in the middle when we played together as kids: I’d lose a couple of years of age and my brother would gain two.
There’s that cliche that your siblings are the longest relationship you’ll ever have. Like most cliches, it’s a cliche because it’s true. I’ve known my brother since I was five years old; he’s never known a world without me in it. There’s nearly forty years of history between us now, a tangle of shared experiences, care, jokes, arguments and resentments that ties us together. One day in the not so distant future when both our parents are dead, he’ll be my only remaining link to my childhood, and I will be his.
I have a theory that siblings of the same gender fight more than siblings of different genders. My sample size is admittedly small: my sons, my brother and I, my mum and her sisters, plus anecdotal evidence from friends and parents of my children’s friends. I’d love to know whether this theory holds true in your experience.
My two sons are currently firmly in a period of high conflict. It feels like at least 70% of the time they are actively policing us - and each other - to make sure that everything is scrupulously fair and equal between them. Making sure that neither of them gets a larger slice of cake, more screen time, more parental affection than the other. I count it as a win if I make to the end of the day without being told that “you love him more than me!”. The other 30% of the time they are the best of buddies, engaged in collaborative imaginative play (though the eldest is growing out of this now), Lego building, drawing or chatting about the TV series they’re both watching. There’s a four year age gap between them. Currently the eldest is 12 and the youngest is 8, so we’re firmly into the tween years and teetering on the edge of the plunge into the teen years (gulp!).
I think my sons must feel like they’re in direct competition with each other for parental love, care and attention to a greater extent than me and my brother ever did. The age gap between both sets of siblings is similar, and I’m definitely not saying that I never fought or fell out with my brother. But I think perhaps being different genders helped us to feel more distinct from each other, with our own separate interests, skills and relationships with our parents. It feels like my sons might experience more overlap between themselves - both in terms of shared interests and hobbies but also in terms of identity. We sometimes refer to them collectively as “the boys”, which is entirely accurate but perhaps serves to erase their identities as separate and independent individuals.
This all seems to be expressed as possessiveness: “that’s my book”; “get out of my room”; “Mum’s helping me with my homework now”. Both of them want and seem to need to enforce very clear boundaries between what is theirs and what is their brother’s. Which can be challenging when they do share many of the same interests and hobbies. If the youngest wants to play the same game as the eldest, the eldest feels like the youngest is copying him. The youngest feels like the eldest has done everything first and better than he can.
I feel a little lost at sea in terms of how to navigate this phase in their sibling relationship (god I hope it’s just a phase!). My first port of call in thinking about how to parent my children is always my memories of how my parents parented my brother and I. Which, leaving aside any differences between boy/boy and girl/boy sibling dynamics, is also at least thirty years out of date. The world has changed so much since I was a child, there’s so many new challenges and dilemmas and risks that my parents never had to think about. But then, isn’t normal to look to our parents’ example first - whether we’re using them as an example of how to do it or how not to do it?
When I was pregnant for the second time and knew that I was carrying a boy again, part of me assumed that I would automatically know how to parent this new child because I had already raised one son (to the dizzy heights of 4 years old!). Before he was born, the image of my younger son in my mind’s eye was essentially a clone of his older brother. Then he was born and I instantly realised that he was his own person, distinct and different from his brother in all sorts of ways. Some were evident within the first few weeks of his life: an oval face, light brown hair, incredibly strong willed, where his older brother as a newborn had a round face, black hair and an easy going nature. Other differences took a little longer to become apparent: an inexplicable love of maths, an insatiable desire to climb everything in sight.
Parenting, in whatever combination of children, age gap and gender, is a constant and ever-evolving challenge to work out how to parent your child(ren) as they grow and change. It’s beautiful and exciting, but my god it can be exhausting.
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