In the full decade since I last saw my brother, he has had children, changed jobs, moved house, survived the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks (he worked nearby) and, by my grandmother’s reckoning, has at last grown into the beard he started nurturing in his early 20s. In the meantime, I have progressed comparably throughout the course of my own adult life (albeit without the facial hair), though he, like me, wouldn’t know this directly but rather secondhand, our respective lives separated by the Atlantic Ocean and an altogether different kind of divide that, I think I can now confidently predict, shall never be breached again.
While this is an admittedly regrettable state of affairs, two grown men incapable of behaving like, well, two grown men, it isn’t a particularly unusual one. Sibling rivalry is as old as the hills, and you need only alight upon the films of Mike Leigh to be reminded that familial strife of some kind is, if not quite mandatory, then at the very least expected of us all.
A recent story in the Psychology Today journal suggests that more than a third of us have a distant relationship with our brothers or sisters as adults because of a childhood rivalry that never fully dissipated, while any hopes of an ultimately long-term ceasefire tends to arrive only in our dotage, when all the fight has finally deserted us.
According to Karen Doherty, who, with Georgia Coleridge, has just written Sibling Rivalry: Seven Simple Solutions to Stop Fights, Prevent Jealousy and Help Your Children Get On Better, it is virtually the rule, not the exception.
“Four out of five siblings will torment, kick, punch, fight and annoy one another at some point during childhood,” Doherty, a sunny Californian living in London, tells me.
I ask her why, and she smiles. “Ah. Well, there are 101 answers to that question.”
The overriding one, it seems, is that the arrival of a younger sibling very often brings with it a brand new sensation for the elder: hatred. This is, after all, the point at which we, the senior, learn that life isn’t fair after all, and very likely won’t be ever again. A potential usurper has arrived; cunning is required. And if we are then subsequently treated differently by our parents, however unwittingly, with different ideals and perhaps even preferential treatment, that hatred can be expected to run deep.
Jonathan Self, the older brother of the British writer Will Self, knows the feeling well.
“I have to say that Will was actually incredibly sweet and loyal to me throughout childhood,” he begins, “but, yes, there was an awful lot of rivalry between us. Why? Well, my parents favored him in a way that was impossible to miss.”
He explains that his parents considered their younger son a genius by the age of three, and that theirs was a family that prized intellect above all else.
“To their credit,” Jonathan says, “they weren’t wrong. Will did have an unusually smart mind. Still does.”
If their rivalry continued into adulthood it was largely because both shared similar ambitions: to write. But Will was, frankly, by far the better writer, prompting Jonathan to give up on his dream (he eventually turned to the world of business). Now 51, and with three children to Will’s four, they enjoy a mostly harmonious relationship these days, specifically, he suggests, because of the children.
“We’ve discussed this at length, as it’s important to us. We know that it really upsets our children if he and I fight, and so we don’t, mostly. If they see us not getting on, then it is effectively like saying it’s OK to give up on your brother. And neither of us wants that,” Jonathan says.
My own experiences differ from the Selfs’ not only because there were, sadly, no such flashes of brilliance within my family, but also because my brother and I were never as closely competitive. Instead, we were poles apart, so comprehensively different in character and temperament that we could rarely find common ground. I’m two and a half years older than him. We had different friends, different interests. Rarely did they appear compatible.
We both hoped that things would improve as we got older, but they didn’t. I finally came of age with an overwhelming sense of relief. I was 18. I had a girlfriend, a driving licence and I was gone. My relationship with my brother gradually frittered away to nothing, and though this brought the pair of us some much-needed respite, for my mother, who blamed herself, it brought only lasting sadness.
So why does sibling rivalry occur, and how do we so effortlessly perpetuate it? Doherty’s book gives us almost 300 pages of possible reasons; but in my own case, being brought up by parents destined to divorce acrimoniously didn’t exactly help matters. Neither did the fact that my poor brother, who resembled my father so much more than I did, became a painful reminder for my mother of the husband who was no longer around. If she treated us differently, she certainly didn’t mean to, but I felt she expected more of me than she did of him. I became in many ways her ally, and a co-parent whether I wanted to or not.
Little wonder, then, that we became such enemies: We represented different sides entirely, and uneven ones at that. My mother, after all, was still around; my father wasn’t.
We also responded to our parents’ divorce very differently. I internalized everything; he mostly externalized. This meant that while I remained unerringly — or, the way I saw it, necessarily — calm, he was quick to lose his patience, and frequently did so at school, resulting in me being called to the headmaster’s office for “consultation.” We were now the product of a broken family, he told me, and so such behavior was only to be expected. Slack was cut, the headmaster indicating that I should be grateful.
But all I felt was the burden of even greater responsibility. I didn’t want any such responsibility. At home, though each of us became expert at giving each other dead arms, we bickered far more than we actually fought, though we did so endlessly and, as we got older, our warring became more psychological, and ugly with it.
I know now that all he really wanted from me was friendship, but as the older sibling, friendship was the last thing I needed from him, my overbearing anchor.
Summer holidays were the worst. While my working mother left us home alone during the day — as did all the parents of all my friends, au pairs conspicuous by their absence in our corner of south-east London — the days dragged on interminably, she imploring me to keep an eye on him, to make sure he didn’t get up to mischief, when mischief was all I really wanted to get up to myself.
There were intermittent amnesties, of course, periods when we managed to put our differences aside and come together in something approaching harmony. These occurred during my mother’s frequent bouts of depression. We knew that she was depressed when the housework went ignored (she was ordinarily a cleanliness freak), and so in these times we became a fully functioning unit, working in tandem for our mutual benefit. It was the only way we knew to try to bring back a smile to our mother’s face. But it didn’t last and we soon fell back into our by now habitual ways. Doesn’t everyone?
In adulthood, something curiously distinct happened to us. I entered into a kind of second childhood, vigorously embracing the sudden absence of familial responsibility, while he had his career in place by the age of 21, and also a mortgage. He would go on to marry his childhood sweetheart, and become a decent, respectable citizen.
Every so often we would, at my mother’s behest (read: pleading), all meet up in a restaurant, amid the safety of other people — in the hope that grown-up harmony had at last found us, but by now we were to one another the kind of people we would cross the road to avoid. At best, we had nothing to say to one another; at worst, there were all manner of disagreements to enter into, and so we did. My mother grew dispirited; respective girlfriends were not impressed.
The last time I saw him was in November 1999, when my mother died of cancer. By now living in the US and working in information technology, he had flown over for the funeral and stayed on in London for a week afterward while we went about the protracted business of tying up her affairs. If a week is a long time in politics, then for unloving brothers it’s a hellish eternity. This final amnesty lasted for the day of the funeral itself, by which time we had exhausted one another’s mettle, leaving us only with tiresomely old hostilities, and a shared sense of shock over who we had become in the intervening years. He was by now a successful professional who smoked cigars and couldn’t believe I didn’t know which version of Microsoft Word my computer ran on. He considered me irresponsible and foolishly carefree, a 30-year-old without a pension.
His last day in London was a memorable one, my then girlfriend (now wife) holding us apart as we squared up to each other, fists raised.
If we’d been looking for a fitting final curtain, we’d just found it.
A decade on, I am now a father myself. And though geography saves my family from coming into further conflict with his, I do worry that I shall pass these miserably dysfunctional behavioral patterns down to my two daughters, aged four and two, something I desperately want to avoid.
I asked Karen Doherty how likely it is, and this energetic woman with her can-do attitude admitted that though 80 percent is hardly good odds, it can be avoided “with effort.” She ran me through a succession of bullet points that are expounded upon in her book. They are bullet points I may well follow to the letter, for I want my girls to be allies in life, not enemies. So far, they seem actively to like one another. Well, mostly they do. I sincerely hope this continues because I know I would be distraught if they ever fell out, when it is clear to me at least that there is so much in both of them to like, and also to love.
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