One Baby or Two? Consider the Precedents
It’s amazing how siblings--seedlings cultivated in the same soil, raised in the same hothouse, fertilized by the same neuroses and traditions--often turn out to have absolutely nothing in common, frequently don’t like each other very much and sometimes even kill each other.
On the surface, it doesn’t make sense. But if you really think about it, why should siblings get along? The condition is implicitly competitive. The whole process of childhood is one long attempt to separate from the family. Or, failing that, to hog all the attention for oneself.
Young siblings have every reason not to like each other. The first resents the second for being born. The second resents the first for being bigger and more powerful. If the second is wily enough, she will perfect the art of verbal harassment, and tease her older sibling into submission. Or at least hysterics, in which case the battle is won. Usually, though, the older child is far more adept at teasing. If he isn’t, he can always sit on her.
If the siblings survive childhood, they can, as adults, continue to resent each other for sins committed as kids. Or they can get into therapy. Either way, dealing with sibling issues requires a lot of energy--energy that could be spent, say, improving bowling scores or learning to play the stock market.
My husband has the best rivalry stories I’ve heard. He claims to have been tortured throughout childhood by his brother, his senior by three years.
He remembers, for instance, a conversation in the bedroom when he was about 4: “See that crack in the wall?” asked his brother. “That’s the one spiders come out of.”
“I don’t see any spiders.”
“That’s because they don’t come out till the lights are out.”
A couple of years later, reports my husband, “My brother said, ‘Did you know it’s been scientifically proven that if you’re held upside down for more than three minutes the blood rushes to your head and you die?’ Then he grabbed me.”
As I contemplate the birth of my first child--an event allegedly taking place in early September--I am already in a quandary over whether to have two.
My husband has two grown children already, so our baby will arrive with a pair of doting (I hope) older siblings in place. But the age difference--22 and 26 years--is likely to make them seem more like aunt and uncle than sister and brother. Eventually, we’ll face a decision: Two babies, or not two babies?
My instinct is to stop at one.
I deeply love my three siblings--I can even stand them sometimes--but the natural order of things suggests we are very lucky to get along at all.
In our family, we did not have sibling rivalry. We had sibling nuclear war, with intermittent truces and occasional mutual cooperation treaties in which we combined forces to skirmish with the Powers That Be.
We devised all manner of mutual torture, from hand-to-hand combat as children to sophisticated mind games as adults. Nobody emerged from our childhood unscathed, and we all have the scars to prove it. (One sister has four little dot-shaped scars on her stomach, the unfortunate legacy of another’s temper tantrum: A fork, thrown against the Danish teak dining room table, bounced off the wood and impaled itself in sibling flesh. Another still flaunts the crescent scars on her wrist she alleges I caused after my first successful attempt at 11 to grow long fingernails.)
Like most parents, ours were helpless in the face of their warring children.
They were beleaguered by our antics, and maybe even a little scared by the forces of destruction they had unleashed in us. There must have been dark moments when they looked at us and experienced the fright one feels when one looks in the mirror and is horrified by what is staring back.
Unless they were hit by flying projectiles, or we required medical attention, our parents basically ignored our fights. But I don’t think they’ve forgotten them.
My husband, on the other hand, the one who catalogued in detail the slights and injuries inflicted by his own brother, has virtual amnesia regarding the rivalries of his children. At least that’s what the kids claim.
“My kids never fought,” he says. “They got along great.”
I don’t know what you’d call it, then, when one child has a friend hold the other one down so that she can stuff raisins up the poor boy’s nose.
Is this the richness I’d be denying my child if we stop at one?
Frankly, I cannot imagine life without my siblings, Jenny, Sara and Peter.
Who, after all, would tell me my nose is getting larger?
Who would remind me my mustache needs to be bleached?
And who would make me laugh until I cry?
We are scattered around the state now, and interact only intermittently. But that doesn’t mean anything has really changed. We may not throw punches anymore or go crying to our parents (at least not much), but our childhood rivalries are always smoldering, waiting to be rekindled at the slightest hostile gust.
All it takes is one razor-edged remark, aimed with precision at an old wound, and feigned innocence when blood is drawn:
“What? What did I say? Why are you always so defensive?”
I get nostalgic just thinking about it.
