By Adrienne Garrison
@adrie.garrison

In those early days, paging through every parenting book I could get my hands on, I had no idea the only guide that would matter would be one that I alone could write. I could write it from a distance of three years, at the very least. I could write it to the mother sitting cross-legged on the floor, one arm cradling a nursing baby and the other sorting puzzle pieces with a toddler, only once those two children were racing their bikes down the hill and outgrowing shoes at an alarming rate. The words I needed to hear, the reassurances that I alone could give, would never get to me in time. 

***

On a mid-winter excursion to a play place, I recognized a mom from the preschool my daughter attended and noted that she also had an older-daughter, younger-son combo. “How far apart are they?” I asked her. 

“A little less than three years.” 

I adjusted the Ergo at my chest for a moment where my nine-month-old was sleeping, watching her children move colored tiles together at a light table. “Did they always get along so well?” It’s possible that I was holding my breath. This wasn’t the first time I’d asked another mom this question, which was layered with shame and confusion. There was no way for this mother to know how desperately I wanted, no needed her to say: Not always.

“They have,” she said. I managed a small smile. “Buddies since the beginning.” 

I remember trying to disengage, bending down to nudge a few more blocks toward my daughter without waking my son. 

“How about yours?” she asked, nodding at Theo against my chest. “Does Penny just love having a little brother?”

***

There is a video on my camera capturing an early interaction between my daughter, nearly three at the time, and my newborn son. He was nestled into a Dock-A-Tot next to me on the couch and she delicately climbed over him, his wide eyes blinking up at her as she came into his field of vision. I remember that moment, how I had opened my phone, longing to capture a sweet interaction between her and her new baby brother. 

She wedged herself against the couch cushions and carefully uncurled his fingers from a fist, slipping one of her fingers inside so that he was holding her hand. At that point, in the video, I coo at them, “Is that your buddy?” In her chirpy little voice, she says. “Yes. Yes buddy.” 

Here it was. The answer to my question of whether rocking her world with a sibling would prove to be more gain than sacrifice. Yes, buddy. Then, her eyes still gazing into his, her finger wrapped inside his fist, she says, “But … no. No buddy.” There are a few beats of silence on the video until she says again, “Yes buddy, but … no buddy,” and then I turn off the camera. 

The next few months, aside from a handful of moments where she would slide in next to him beneath his play gym and bat at his toys, my daughter maintained a casual indifference toward my son. We told ourselves to give it time, that when he began to move around and talk and engage with the world, their connection would deepen. When, at about five months, Theo began to sit propped up with pillows, thrilled to experience his favorite toys from a whole new angle, we all took notice. 

“Look at this big boy!” I said, tucking him against a Boppy pillow on the floor, and scattering a few rattles and crinkle books within his reach. I ducked into the kitchen to unload the dishwasher, pausing to kiss Penny on the top of the head as she paged through a picture book on the other side of the room. About the time I got to the silverware, he was crying, face down on the carpet, tipped forward. “Poor little guy,” I said, picking him up and soothing him. It took an embarrassing number of repetitions before I put it together—that the tumbles were happening only when I was out of the room, even momentarily. Even then, I didn’t want to believe it until I saw it with my own eyes. Our precious, mellow, 3-year-old daughter had made a sport out of baby-tipping. Every faceplant and wail delighted her, mirth spreading across her little face in a way that both alarmed and infuriated me. 

“Penny! That is not okay! That hurts him. Look at his face, he’s so sad! He is crying.” She would hardly glance up from her play. “Can you rub his back and help him feel better?” I repeated this response, and all variations and escalations therein, ​​multiple times a day. For weeks, I couldn’t be more than arm’s length from him when she was anywhere nearby. She would swoop in, trying to topple him before I could stop her. When my blocks became more like exasperated shoves, I knew I was at the end of my rope. The next morning, I lingered in the preschool office after drop off, asking the director for some of her time. 

We sat at a round wooden table, stacked with picture books. Parents came and went as we talked, and I found myself speaking in a hushed tone. “We’ve been struggling with Penny. She’s so physical with her brother. I can’t leave the two of them together for a second.” It wasn’t as though this was my first attempt getting help. I’d listened to countless podcast episodes, polled a handful of my friends, and talked in circles about it with my husband and my mom, but everything I read or heard was some variation of, “No, my older child adored the baby from the very beginning,” or, “If anything, I had to help him to be less insistent on hugging and kissing his baby sister.”

Thankfully, our preschool director had another perspective for me. “Penny is just being a little scientist,” she assured me. “Every time she’s in the room with her little brother, it’s like being in a room with a giant red button that says ‘Do Not Touch.’ She’s curious. She knows if she pushes him she’ll get a reaction out of him.” 

This was a new take. “So, you don’t think she’s bullying him?” I asked. I paused a moment before admitting, “She almost seems to delight in hurting him. She giggles about it most of the time, even when I tell her that it’s causing him pain.” 

“She will find other ways of interacting with him. Give it time.” 

***

A banshee scream rings out in the living room where my daughter and son, now six and three, have been acting out a rousing game of pirates and mermaids. 

“What is it?” I ask, hoisting a laundry basket over my pregnant belly on my way to their bedrooms. Theo’s scream is now sounding more like a growl, and he’s swinging his close-fisted arm at his sister, who darts away nimbly. 

“I don’t WANT her to kiss me!” he says, scowling as he chases after her. On my way up the stairs, I toss out a pat reminder to use his words, not his body. “And Penny, listen to your brother when he says he doesn’t want you to kiss him right now.” 

This is what it has become, nearly three years later. It has become staged weddings and gentle conversations on how someday, when it is really time to get married, they will both have to find someone not in our family to fall in love with. They half-listen, disappointment flickering for a moment in their eyes before they run off again, Penny clipping hair bows on Theo’s collar so that he can look “proper” for the ceremony. On a recent attempt at a Mommy Day, Penny cut our morning short, vetoing a pizza lunch at the mall or a chocolate chip cookie at our favorite coffee shop in order to get back to her brother. 

“I miss Theo,” she tells me, looking out the window as we head towards home. “But if you really want to swing by the coffee shop, I guess that’s okay as long as I can share my cookie with him.” 

Of course, sometimes they fight. Sometimes they need a break from one another and they can’t seem to separate, like magnets alternately finding their attracting and polarized sides. If the pandemic had shut us down one year sooner, I would have been playing defense during a lockdown, but as it was, the time at home has cemented their friendship. They are perfectly suited for each other. Penny leads the way and Theo, now louder and more assertive than she is by far, makes it very clear when he’s not going along with her plan.

When I look back at those months when my toddler was systematically shoving my infant face first into the carpet multiple times a day, I can still feel the remnants of that impossible cocktail of anger, shame, and brokenheartedness. Watching one of your children hurt the other—it’s like being torn in two. All in all, she was physically rough with him for about nine months. After taking a handful of cautious steps on his first birthday, Theo had waited another four weeks until his sister was away at Grandma’s house for a weekend to try walking again. By the time she returned, he was all straight-legged confidence, and this seemed to give her a new perspective. She was seeing him nearly eye-to-eye for the first time. Aside from the occasional outburst when a precious toy was snatched away, the two of them have gotten along fairly peacefully from that point on. 

Paging back through my journals of those months when I was flying blind, I see only the briefest mentions of this conflict. While I can’t whisper back encouragement to this younger version of myself, the things I left unsaid—even on the intimate pages of my own diary—speak volumes to me now. Even as I was living through the turbulence of not knowing how this struggle would resolve and what it might mean, I was fiercely protective of my daughter’s story, terrified to set her actions in permanent ink. From here, I can see that it was a simple sibling power imbalance, but from that place on the carpet, my arm swinging out to block one piece of my heart from crashing into the other, it was a problem I was desperate to solve, a personal failure, a pattern of behavior that hurt us all so very much. 

In the silent avoidance of those pages, I am reminded that I can survive the not knowing. When I am not enough to go around, when I cannot stop the pain, when I don’t know what to do, we will still be okay. There is a future me, looking back with a little more perspective, a few more answers, who would give anything to tell me things aren’t nearly as dark as they seem. 

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.