Bonded

When my son was born, I gave him the blog nickname of ‘Bruiser’ based purely on how he made my insides feel during the last few months of my pregnancy. Fortunately, the name was a perfect fit. Today, the kid loves sports and action games, playing outside with his buddies and wrestling with his father. He perpetually has food on his face and mud on his clothes, no matter how recently he’s showered or changed. He firmly believes that the words ‘butt’ and ‘fart’ are never not funny. He adores space and science experiments, monsters and sharks, motorcycles and airplanes.

But more than any of those things, he loves his older sister.

And this has presented an interesting conundrum. Punky is a dainty, dress-wearing doll fanatic who always has her nose in a book. She is also my son’s hero and best friend and has been since he was a baby, which means that anything that interests her is “cool,” according to him, even if it’s My Little Pony or Taylor Swift or anything else he typically wouldn’t go near under any circumstances.

Punky accepts her brother’s devotion with grace and a minimum of teasing. Realizing early on that the kid was going to be following her wherever she went for the foreseeable future, she has learned to develop at least some interests that she and her brother can share, like nature walks, two-player video games, Pokemon, building blanket forts, and stuffed animal collecting. When she has friends over, she (mostly) accepts the fact that her little brother will insist on being right there in the thick of whatever the girls are doing. He won’t necessarily play along- He just wants to be around and in on the action. Punky usually goes along with it because she genuinely loves him and doesn’t want to hurt his feelings. Watching this play out over and over again has made my heart swell with parental pride– and it’s brought a sense of healing for me, too, because I had an older brother that I worshipped as a kid and… well…. let’s just say the feeling was not and is not and never will be mutual– and leave it at that.

With that said,  I knew this past weekend was going to put my kids’ brother-sister bond to the test.

Punky had a sleepover birthday party Saturday night with ten girl ranging in age from 10 to 12 years old. The girls spent most of their time outside playing an elaborate game they invented called Wolf Clan, and Bruiser was part of it. Once they came inside, though, things changed. It was time for that sleepover rite of passage known as Truth or Dare.

I came up with the truths and dares ahead of time to avoid problems– but I knew that my son really didn’t need to be a part of the game. No self-respecting 12-year-old girl would want to share her most embarrassing moment at school with an eight-year-old boy in the room. Plus, knowing that he would be asked to leave, several of the dares I created required the girls to find him and say or do something silly. And so, before the game began, Bruiser was asked to leave the playroom.

And he was devastated.

He stalked past me through the kitchen and out the front door, where he plopped down on the steps. When I went out to check on him, his face was red, his fists clenched, his eyes filled with tears. “Why don’t you come hang out with Dad and me?” I asked him. “We’ll watch whatever you want on TV. Besides, Punky and her friends are just playing a silly girl game. You’d hate it.”

“I don’t want to hang out with you and Dad,” he muttered angrily. “I just want to watch them play Truth or Dare.”

“Well, you can’t,” I told him. “You’ve got to let your sister enjoy her friends on her own for a little while. It’s only fair.” He glared back at me in wounded silence.

Seeing that we were at a stalemate, I left him alone and rejoined Dennis in the den. We flipped channels for a few minutes and stopped on a show featuring various accordion bands playing polka music for rooms full of high-stepping senior citizens. It was hilarious and oddly hypnotic. A few minutes later, Bruiser came back inside and stomped past us, still quivering with 8-year-old rage. He had FEELINGS about being banished from Punky’s party, all right, and he was finally ready to let them out.

“This!” he shouted, pointing at the television screen, “is UNCOOL!” We stared at him, trying not to laugh. “And watching this show…” he paused, clearly weighing whether his words would go too far and land him in his room for the next 30 minutes, “…MAKES PEOPLE UNCOOL!” Oh! My! We did our best to wear appropriate expressions of shock and dismay and, satisfied that his verbal arrows had hit their mark, Bruiser continued on through the den into the sunroom, slamming the door behind him.

“Whoa,” I said to my husband. “He is really upset.” We felt bad for him, but thought it best to leave him alone.

Eventually, Bruiser’s rage was spent and he consented to join us for Lost in Space on DVR. He was even invited up to the playroom for the last few rounds of dares, so he didn’t feel completely left out. But I realized that night that this is going to happen more and more as his sister gets older, and when I think about it, my heart hurts for him. Fortunately, I’m not alone.

Yesterday, I told my daughter what had happened after Bruiser was kicked out of the playroom–  I thought she should know how deeply it had affected him. I assumed she’d take it into consideration and probably even giggle with me a little over The Polka Incident. Instead, she promptly burst into tears.

“I just feel so bad for him,” she wept. “Poor Bruiser. I didn’t know!”

As I watched her,  tried my best not to cry right along with her. The fact that my own two children– who couldn’t be more different– love each other this much means everything, everything to me. Beyond my fervent hope that I’m witnessing the start of what will be a lifelong connection that cannot be broken, my kids have no idea that each act of kindness and concern they show for one another chips away at a hurt that has existed in me for as long as I can remember. What they have together makes up for what I didn’t have with my own brother, a thousandfold.

Parenting is hard, hard work and children by their nature often leave us feeling undervalued and unappreciated. But they also present us with unexpected, life-altering gifts– and the relationship between my two youngest children just might be the best I ever receive.