By There’s a brilliant beach near where I live. The tide of this beach rolls in and out over a distance of about a mile and a half, which means that things tend to get washed ashore quite a lot. We’ve seen crabs and stingrays and old lobster traps scattered across the sand over the course of our family visits. But recently we saw something new. We saw The Monstrosity.
I still have no idea what The Monstrosity was. It was basically a mass of semi-transparent tentacles, curled and slimy and flopped outwards like a genuinely hellish Play-Doh hair salon kit. My god, this thing was gruesome; like the Predator’s mouth after a vomiting fit. It looked like a man bun of earthworms. It was probably venomous. It could almost definitely open up and eat a person whole. Hand on heart, I do not think The Monstrosity was of this earth.
My reaction, upon stumbling across this aquatic atrocity, was to scream and recoil. My four-year-old’s reaction was also to scream and recoil. And then my one-year-old saw it. Reader, my one-year-old did not recoil. My one-year-old, the idiot, slammed his palm down right in the middle of it. Right, square in the middle, squelching down as hard as he could while my four-year-old and I cried and dry-heaved in the background.
So here’s my question. How the fuck are you supposed to parent this?
Child one, I understand. He’s a scientifically flawless amalgamation of his mother and me. His is a life of shyness specked with moments of extreme extroversion. He’s floppy-haired and slightly lazy. He likes books. He’s astoundingly sensitive. We went out for dinner last night, and just before pudding he whispered “I’m sad and I don’t know why,” and that’s the easiest thing in the world for me to take care of because, hey, aren’t we all.
His brother, though, is a goddamn exocet. Take him to soft play and he’ll haul himself up the biggest teetering multistorey scaffold skyscraper he can find, all by himself, until he’s a speck in the rafters; at which point he’ll upon a slide and fling himself down head-first. Take him to the playground and his first point of call will be the most comically dangerous thing he can access. Take him to the beach and, on the rare occasions when he isn’t trying to hulk-smash a charybdis, he’ll pelt headfirst at the sea.
The boy has literally no sense of fear. None at all. He laughs in the face of danger. Literally. Once, when he saw me screaming in alarm because he’d somehow clambered to the top of a stool to better reach a kitchen knife, he giggled so violently that he almost started choking. Threats bounce off him. Guilt turns to ash as it hits his orbit. My entire parenting armoury consists of nothing but methodical persuasion, but none of it even leaves a mark on this little git.
Why isn’t he like us? Where did this come from? Part of me wants to Who Do You Think You Are the hell out of this shit, by thoroughly researching all my ancestors until I discover who gave him this adventurous gene, then travelling back in time and throwing them down a well. I swear to god, as soon as I find a great-uncle-twice-removed who enjoyed abseiling, that guy is dead meat.
There is probably a reasonable explanation for his behaviour, though. I once chatted with a child psychologist who suggested that this is just how younger siblings work. They’re hard-coded to see what their big brothers or sisters receive praise for, so that they can navigate an alternative route. Our oldest is kind and mild and cautious, and so our youngest has taken an opposite path to better avoid his shadow. This is why, when you meet two siblings who are both equally good at the same thing, you’re essentially witnessing an affront to nature.
Still, this hasn’t stopped me from banging my head against the wall about how to control him. As parents, it sometimes feels like we’re utterly powerless against the sheer force of his personality. But I think we’re getting there. With every passing day I’m finding a little more to cling on to; how all his behaviour is anchored in misplaced affection, how making him laugh seems to be the key to holding his attention. It’s slow work, but it’s coming.
One thing I never want to do, though, is crush this out of him. This restless tendency to bulldoze everything in sight is exhausting, but it’s going to be the absolute making of him. He’ll want for nothing, because he’ll go out and get everything. It might not be a trait that anyone else in his family has, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good trait to have. Besides, mark my words, we’re all going to need him when Cthulhu attacks.
Like this article? Sign up to our newsletter to get more articles like this delivered straight to your inbox
