One Felt Pen to Rule Them All

“What strange creatures brothers are!” ― Jane Austen

They’re at it. Again.

I can hear it through the walls.

It starts quietly enough. But soon, it’ll be out of hand.

The kids are bickering. Arguing over some silly little thing. She’ll pick up one toy, left untouched by him for months, and suddenly it’s all he wants. We ask her to hand it over—the injustice of it!—and she reluctantly complies, then instinctively goes for the one item that’ll make him erupt. He’ll lose his rag; she’ll respond in kind.

They keep finding novel ways to wind each other up. When he was a toddler, he realised he could shout “caca” enough times, at a certain volume, in a certain register, and she would be certain to see red. As they’ve got older, they’ve learned ever more sophisticated ways to push each other’s buttons. At least they’re used less often now.

One memorable altercation came down to a felt tip pen. Stationary regularly plays a recurring role in their battles; it’s not like they don’t have enough of it. This was 1 of a 28-pack apparently being used with too much pressure. If this were amateur fiction, I’d have written the pen dark red, clunkily heralding the imminent arrival of anger. For all I can remember, it was sunshine yellow. Yet here we are.

They snap at one another over this pen, this construction of plastic and ink that can’t be worth more than 30¢. I am staggered to see this non-proportionate response, a major retaliation to such a minor infraction. Sean Bean’s Boromir echoes in my mind, “A strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing.” A felt pen, the nib now submerged slightly further into its plastic house than a minute earlier. Might I be less annoyed if it was something more substantial they were arguing over? One of their Micro scooters, or his Sonic the Hedgehog t-shirt?

Probably. I’ll find out soon. The die has been cast.

One felt pen to rule them all.

The worst thing about their anger? It’s contagious. Try as you might to remain calm and centred, allowing it to pass, the bickering gets under your skin. On a good day, you can channel your inner Elsa and let it go. But in your weaker moments, too tired for it all, you give it right back. With bells on. You immediately feel bad. They feel worse. A family is a living example of Einstein’s maxim: “Everything is energy, and that's all there is to it.” Every family a collection of squiggles, bouncing off one another happily enough, before a small squabble pushes the entire day towards a black hole.

Sibling rivalry is hardest for the eldest. A huge “IMHO” caveat, but as the eldest, I’ll always lean that way. My daughter had almost five years solo, running the ranch. She was so excited to have a baby brother. She continues to love him dearly, to be incredibly caring and gentle with him, to protect him in the face of all threats perceived and actual. But that initial adoration dissipated over time—once the new baby smell wore off, when he’d started walking, talking and having a point of view of his own, and when said POVs began to conflict with her own, to catastrophic effect.

There’s a lot of discussion on the difficulty of two “2 under 2”, and rightly so. But when your kids have a bigger gap, and the shit hits the fan, you need to teach two distinct, age-appropriate—but overlapping—lessons at the same time. When they’re toddlers, this lesson is simple: share toys more, push people less. But when they’re older? Well, let’s start by talking about managing their emotions, taking a breath, counting down from ten—yes, the same thing Dad tries with his meditation—before getting into how elder siblings should be the ones who de-escalate, not antagonise.

Virginia Sole-Smith @v_solesmith

My children are currently fighting over an invisible bike that the 7 year old won't share. I pointed out to the 3 year old that she could just ride her own invisible bike and she lay down and sobbed BUT I ONLY WANT HERS. We're done with this week now, yes?

“YOU DON’T GET IT,” my daughter likes to tell me. Oh, my darling child, if anyone understands the innate unfairness in the life of the eldest, it’s your mum and dad. We’ve been there, done that, bought the t-shirt, then wore it whilst we paved the way for your aunties.

At her age I was always bickering with my sisters. It was constant, relentless. There was—and I’m happy to say, continues to be—a lot of love between the three of us. We laughed a lot, but those relationships were forged in the fire of the battle. They were twins—two vs. one—younger by two years, their modus operandi how to size up and overthrow an older brother. Their need to form alliances was driven by survival instinct. Sometimes, these unions worked; other times, they did not. But disaster was never far away.

I remember one particular eruption. The balance of power had clearly shifted against me. Red mist descended. I chased them up the stairs, trying to kick one—or both. I reached the landing, geared up for a helluva booting, before they closed the bedroom door, timing this to perfection. My foot went straight through it. The sound of the door crumpling remains to this day—as does my feeling of shock, how easily destroyed this rectangle was, strong in stature but weak in fabrication—as a harbinger of chaos to come. I’ve since learned these are hollow core doors: lightweight, loosely packed with cardboard, closing them reminiscent of trying to force a feather through air. An unstoppable force met an immovable object, leaving me precariously balanced, one foot on the hallway floor and the other inside the bedroom. Watching The Shining many years later I’d laugh, looking back on this as my early homage to Jack Nicholson’s bathroom entrance. My sisters, taking advantage of this unique opportunity, proceeded to kick the guilty foot from their side of the door.

My kids aren’t this physical. That’s by design. I do all I can to make sure. But how much of this squabbling can be filed away as normal sibling behaviour? I wanted some reassurance I wasn’t the only one, so I turned to the other dads in the community—and was glad I did. “Fistfights were pretty common,” one shared, “We would sometimes end up 100 yards away from where we started.” It was “equal parts mutual agitation and me being a jerk,” confessed another. One dad talked about his experience with his elder sibling putting him off having a second child. Another shared thoughts on a relationship with a sibling long beyond repair: “We fought a lot as kids, and don't get on now as adults. I don't like the guy. I think the feeling is pretty mutual.”

One dad, also the eldest, professed to being “guilty of being a wind-up merchant a lot of the time.” I have been reliably informed (by the parents of teenagers) that eldest children will develop superhuman abilities to enrage younger siblings, antagonising them without only a look, imperceptible to almost any parent, like those anti-loitering mosquito speakers that can only be heard by ears under a certain age.

Could these stories help triangulate the problem? Maybe I could uncover a pattern that could offer hope. Is it related to developmental stages? Age gaps? Gender? It seems to escalate every summer—maybe it’s the seasons, the heat, the amount of time they’re together, or Mercury in retrograde again? (It’s always Mercury. The problem child of the solar system.) I went seeking—as I strangely do in times of crisis—peer-reviewed research papers, but no correlations could be found. Sisters and brothers argue as much as brothers on their own—although sister-only siblings tend to argue less. Age doesn’t make a difference, but the fighting seems to drop off as they enter double digits.

The biggest break-ups are forgotten or repaired as we age. Some, sadly, are not. How we experience conflict at home becomes our model for navigating it through adulthood. You repeat the patterns you grew up with, often without awareness. If you start to see them, and don’t like their effect on how you think and act, then it’s only “doing the work” that can break the cycle. If you subscribe to the idea that life’s toughest moments are its greatest opportunities for growth, then, as Marcus Aurelius famously said, “The obstacle becomes the way.” Can parents use these outbursts to teach their kids how to deal with conflict throughout their lives? Can we help our kids navigate discord today—in a safe space, with siblings, friends, and parents—so they can better do it as the adults they will become?

I don’t have the answers. If I’m honest, I’m still figuring it out myself.

But these feel like the right questions to ask.

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3 things to read this week

1. “The Cult of Baby Tech” by Kelli María Korducki in Business Insider. A deep dive into the past, present and future of baby technology. No, I’m not talking those terrible VTech laptops (though I’m still a little mad the Fisher Price DJ setup didn’t drop until my kids were too old). These are all the gadgets we buy when we’re preparing for the imminent arrival of a baby, and we’re more prone than ever to assuaging our anxiety with an Amazon delivery, even though many of these products will only add to it. (Kudos to the dads who bought TedOS while prepping for their kids to be born: you’ll hopefully have been spared this thanks to the buying guides I meticulously researched and wrote.)

2. “Is My Husband A Doormat?” by Lidija Hilje in The New York Times. It’s strange what can trigger our worst behaviours. In this story, a father and husband is set off by the results of an Enneagram personality test, and begins a bout of soul searching, and a new direction forward. The NYT’s Modern Love series is always worth a read, more than ever this week. “He realized why the Enneagram had triggered him so much: It hadn’t shown him the person he was but the person his childhood experiences had conditioned him to be. And there was a deep chasm between those two versions. After the Enneagram held that mirror up to him, he couldn’t reconcile himself to it, but he also didn’t know what to do about it.”

3. “Blood, Sweat, Tears and Body Shaming: A Cartoonist’s Guide to Becoming a Mother” by Becky Barnicoat in The Guardian. Wrapping up the links this week with this brilliant piece. It should have been in last week’s motherhood special, but your humble editor is not even remotely close to having his shit together enough to have planned that far ahead. No quote, but here’s one screengrab from half a dozen I could have shared:

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Good Dadvice

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Adolescence: A TNF RoundTable

The conversation around Adolescence, the new four-part series from Netflix, has filled my filter bubble this week. The show was created by writer Jack Thorne and actor Stephen Graham, who previously worked with director Shane Meadows on This is England. Technically impressive—each of its four episodes is filmed in one shot—and emotionally devastating, it investigates the murder of a teenage girl by a teenage boy, and is more whydunnit than whodunnit. It points fingers in many directions: schools, underfunded communities, parenting norms, and the toxic corners of the internet young boys are increasingly spending their time.

We’ve been talking about it in The Dadscord this week. One dad who saw the whole thing said it was “an exploration of the impact of such an event on those it leaves behind, and how pain travels from generation to generation.” I’ve carved out viewing time next week, knowing it’ll be a hard watch—filled with the grit that viewers of Meadows movies know so well. By all accounts it’s essential viewing for those of us raising sons.

For paid newsletter subscribers, I’m going to schedule a time later this month to talk with some of you about it. I’ll post the link in The Dadscord next week.

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