My son and daughter bound into the room holding hands. I take a picture of this, because it’s never happened before. When she was born, our initial concern was that he would be the one to act out, suspicious of a new interloper into the family unit. These fears were unfounded, as he immediately took to his little sister with delight, awed by her cuteness, treating her like a living doll he’d been given as a present.
She arrived bearing gifts, too, a brand new Lego fire station for him to play with. To this day, I don’t know what possessed her, at just a few hours old, to be so generous, nor how she had the faculties to source and pay for such an elaborate playset. Any time I ask my wife, she looks at me funny and refuses to explain, so I guess he and I will never know.
In any case, that was the last generosity she afforded him. Her attitude since has been dismissive, bordering on contempt. She’s reacted to his hugs as if they’re attacks on her person; has angrily refused items he’s proffered in generosity; and ground umpteen play sessions to a halt by stealing his toys, one by one, until he is entirely bereft of playthings and she is left sitting opposite him, motionless and glowering, atop a dragon’s hoard of toys she’s too busy protecting to play with.
Sometimes her rebukes have been so mean-spirited as to be comical. Just last week, at breakfast, he asked us if his cat impression was any good, and uttered what his mum and I thought was a very creditable miaow. Well done, we said, before his sister narrowed her eyes and, through tightened lips, uttered a single, disabusing word on what she thought it sounded like: ‘Dog!’
Most of the time he laughs it off, but we can tell it stings. For more than a year now we’ve tried to manage his expectations by telling him she loves him very much, but ‘in her own way’ – a claim that becomes harder to defend on those occasions where she simply walks into the room and attempts to thump him on the head for no reason other than he’s there. ‘She’ll come round,’ we say, holding her back from fisticuffs like a 2am drunk in a Mississippi roadhouse.
And then, this week, all that changed. Typically, when he and I go to pick her up from nursery, she pushes him out of the way to get to me, and cries if he dares hug her. Now she seeks him first and embraces him avidly. She laughs at things he says and where once she sought him out to push him over or steal whatever he might be holding, she now seeks him out to bop him on his nose, get him to read her a book, or take him by her gummy little hand in search of adventure. She approaches him, unbidden, for cuddles, and lays her head on his shoulder while they watch TV, a process which requires him to slouch at contortionist angles to accommodate her tiny neck.
He doesn’t mind. He smiles contentedly and says, ‘She loves me now.’ He’s never stopped thinking she’s the cat’s pyjamas. And now, finally, she reckons he’s the dog’s miaow.
