My son has recently started reading to his sister. This is adorable, but it also happens to be convenient, since my wife and I are well within that phase of life where any act of sitting on the floor is to be rationed, if not avoided entirely. So, at least once or twice a week, he now takes our place, thumbing through her thick-card picture books and reciting their humdrum contents to his delighted charge.
There is an aspect of the performative here – he is old enough to know when he’s being cute and that said cuteness is usually rewarded – but all artifice is inevitably forgotten once he becomes rapt himself, leaving them giggling together on the carpet.
Theirs is an unavoidably unequal relationship. He’s five and she’s one and a half, a gap large enough that my son feels no threat to his superiority, and she no awareness that such a hierarchy might even exist. As a result, he is a good brother, if inconsistent. He vacillates between adoring and ignoring; full of cuddles and kisses one minute, grabbing things out of her hand as if she’s furniture, the next. If I had to give him a rating, it’d be a 7/10. She would probably give him a 14.
The happiest I see her every day is when I pick her up from nursery and her absurd little head explodes with smiles. She’s stretched and slimmed a little from her earliest days, but her face still boasts the soft squareness of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. I take what personal joy I can from her greeting, before she is strapped in her buggy, at which point her attention turns instantaneously to her big brother. She knows we’re off to pick him up and begins chanting his name. Eighteen months in, it’s the word she says better than any other, and she repeats it non-stop for the entirety of the five-minute journey to his school. By the time we arrive, she is waving her arms and kicking her legs in paroxysms of delight.
For a long time, I thought I just had good timing; an instinctive knack for turning up at the school gates just as he was coming out of the building to greet us. I now know that his teachers have simply learned to recognise the slowly increasing volume of her insane siren song, which precedes our arrival like clockwork.
And sometimes, it must be said, this adoration is indistinguishable from malice, as when she punches him for no reason, or pulls his hair – both intrinsic phrases within any baby’s love language. Mostly, trouble starts when her wish to sit beside him transforms, via some logic known only to her, into a desire to sit on top of him, within him even. Stumped by the limits of Euclidean geometry, she cries in frustration as her attempts to occupy the same dimensional space as another object fails entirely.
My son used to bristle at this, but now he knows what to do. He pats her on the head and coos. Reaching across the carpet for a book, he makes sure I’m watching, and starts to read.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
