I would like to begin this week’s post by publicly apologizing to my younger sister for being such a dick of an older brother when we were kids.
Sorry, Dani. Truly.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that I wasn’t as nice to my sister as I could/should have been when we were younger. I definitely adopted the twisted philosophy of, “I can pick on my sister all I want, but if you try, I will fuck you up,” or something to that effect.
When it was someone outside the family giving her a hard time, I had her back. Otherwise, I was kind of an asshole — at times a huge asshole.
Now I’m getting a third-person perspective as I watch my daughters interact. Our first born seems to have inherited a few of her dad’s dickish tendencies.
The soon-to-be-3-year-old is continually working on her speaking skills. Most of the time, she’s pretty easy to understand, but at least a few times a day, I feel like I need a translator. I ask her to repeat things over and over in the hopes that, eventually, I’ll figure it out.
When the almost-6-year-old can’t understand her sister, however, her strategy is to repeat what she perceives as gibberish with a slightly condescending inflection.
Example: The second born might say, with her toddler enunciation, something like, “I want a granola bar for a snack.” First born, pretending she didn’t understand, might reply, “You want a ola blah for a neck?”
Now, I’m pretty damn sure the older one understands just fine. Often when the grownups can’t understand the Tiny One, the Tall One is able to translate. So there’s a good chance she’s doing this just to be an ass.
She also will encourage her younger sister to do things she knows to be against the rules, or just plain annoying, presumably in the hopes we will scold the Tiny One.
Example: The Tiny One gives some of her dinner to the dog and we ask her not to. At which point the Tall One chimes in with, “Do it, Maddie! Give Calvin your dinner! Do it, Maddie, do it!”
All of this (sigh) is uncomfortably reminiscent of when I was a child. Although I like to think I was a bit cleverer in my youth than my older daughter is.
Sure, I tried (and often succeeded) to get my sister in trouble, but I wasn’t so obvious about it. One time I remember vividly was asking my sister to sing the “Where is Thumbkin?” song with me. When we got to the middle finger, apparently also known as “Tall Man,” I conspicuously abstained and let her throw up that No. 1. Then I ran to tell my parents that she gave me the finger, and she got a stern talking-to.
When I was condescending, it was more about belittling her for not knowing some unimportant fact that most kids her age wouldn’t have known.
“You think the language we speak is American? Ha! It’s English, dumbass.”
I was terrible. Although, one could argue, the way many people in this country speak has little in common with English. So maybe American is an unofficial language.
I guess what goes around comes around. My mom informed me after this post that I was a notorious shit head at bedtime, refusing to stay in bed. Now my kids do the same to me.
And after a childhood of giving my sister a hard time, I’m bearing witness to the next generation of older sibling douche-baggery. I’m sure a lot of it is common and/or normal. Still, it’s a bit disturbing when I think to myself, “Why is she being so awful to her little sister? … Ah, fuck. I did the same type of stuff when I was a kid, didn’t I? Damn it.”
