Since Everyone's Talking About Siblings

I made some, and sometimes I hurt their feelings.

(Quick note: If you enjoy this post, please feel free to ♥️ it! With every ♥️, you are affirming someone’s feelings about their birth order…)

Long ago, when I was a blissfully ignorant parent of one, a friend with a kid the same age as my older — then only — son asked me, “Do you feel like you’re always yelling at your kid?”. Kind of! I responded enthusiastically, sympathetically, trying not to let my pity and pride creep through. I honestly wasn’t a big yeller. Not that I didn’t feel over-burdened, under-appreciated, and flat out indignant about the time and energy I had to pour into the child I chose to have and very much wanted. But yelling? Not my style. I guess I’m just a better parent than she is? I thought to myself.

Then my son stopped sleeping, and the bitch in me found her voice.

My son must have just turned two when the (actual) waking nightmare began. I was very pregnant with his younger brother, trying to speed through all the proximate steps of development before the new baby came. In retrospect, not a tactic I’d recommend, but I still harbored the foolish illusion of control back then. I decided that while my son had shown no interest in upgrading to a regular bed, we should initiate the transition out of his crib so that we wouldn’t have to pay for another soon-to-be-useless bundle of sticks. During early parenthood, there is nothing more annoying (so many annoyances to choose from!) than dropping dollar after dollar on crap you know you will become obsolete — relegated or the trash or to the garage or upcycled if you’re truly virtuous — mere months from the time you bought it. Nevermind that a crib is actually a soft, very humane cage, which, as long as your child is willing to accept being kenneled, makes your life so much easier. I was in my third trimester! I wasn’t thinking straight! Someone (my husband) should have stopped me!

You may ask yourself ‘my god, what have I done?’……

My eldest is no dummy. Without literal bars around him, there was no way of convincing him that he had to stay in his bed. Every nap, every bed time, after tucking him in, he’d quickly appear in the hall, shuffling along in his sleep sac like an adorable Pac Man ghost. My husband and I wondered, is it unethical to LOCK him in his room? Then did it anyway, then couldn’t take the screaming, banging, and frequent smearing of diaper cream on the door that ensued. So we started taking turns sitting in the darkness of his bedroom, waiting him out. I was scared to move, refused to look at my phone lest the glow of the screen attract his attention. I vetoed a nightlight. Wouldn’t allow him toys in his bed. I read about incentivizing good sleep habits with rewards, and offered to buy him a plastic excavator (his choice) if he could fall asleep five nights in a row without our supervision. He did it! Then immediately abandoned the practice after getting his toy. One Saturday afternoon, fed up with him climbing out of bed to sit on my lap during nap time, I stormed out of his room, excavator in hand, yelling (YELLING!) that I was taking it back because he couldn’t follow the rules. He screamed, pleading with me as I left to please not take away his toy. His sad little cries were heartbreaking. Hurting his feelings hurt my own and I called my mom to cry about it.

Actual truck challenge, stickers long ago pilfered .

Ever since my younger son hit two-and-a-half, the age his older brother was when he was born, the disparate parenting my children receive has weighed heavy on my conscience. Did I expect my younger son, at two-and-a-half, to sleep without a nightlight? Hell no! Why was I so threatened by the nightlight to begin with? The nightlight’s primary function is to HELP children sleep! So much of the day-to-day, getting dirty at a playground, acting crazy at the grocery store, is a breeze with my second, because it was a total shit show with my first. I don’t demand the self-control and independence of my second born that I anticipated from my first because I can finally see, he’s a FUCKING baby! But my poor first born, every time he has a birthday, he is the first [INSERT AGE]-year-old child I’ve parented. I don’t know what to expect, or how to manage whatever new phase of maturity makes an appearance. It pains me for my older son, to never get the mom who knows what she’s doing, to always be learning alongside me, fumbling through amateur hour with me, to have to teach me over and over again that he’s a child only to watch me turn and apply the education to his little brother.

My husband is the oldest of three children, and he’s often said that he and his siblings were raised by different parents. I am the youngest of three, and while I wasn’t around to witness what came before me, I’m pretty sure that for my family, the same can also be said. I see how that makes older siblings feel. I know it can breed resentment toward people like me and my youngest son, who are always getting the chillest, most capable iteration of the caretakers. But as a youngest child, I have also watched and envied the inextricability of a parent and their oldest child. A mother shares her body with all her children (with obvious exceptions okay??), they are one thing before they are two. But with the oldest kid comes a different closeness also. The first child makes you into something you never were before, a parent. Just as you literally birth them, them metaphorically birth you. It’s a complicated (perhaps sometimes burdensome for the child) connection, but it’s a special one too. An oldest child gets to know and understand a parent in a way youngest children never will. And while “knowing” and “understanding” their parents doesn’t seem like much of a priority for my kids at this stage in their lives, I’m crossing my fingers that one day it will be.