The Raging Elitist

The boys’ faces glowed with excitement in the candlelight. The shade in the dining room was drawn, and the overhead lights turned down low. It was Sunday night; Scotty’s first week of kindergarten and Cartter’s seventh birthday were in the books; and we were celebrating. I could see my boys as clearly as ever, their delicate expectations of mirth dancing back and forth in the warm, flickering light between them. It was the perfect opportunity for me to inadvertently hurt someone’s feelings, which is exactly what I did.

I’d prepared Tuna steaks on the grill, a strange and exotic offering for the brothers, and I was confident that it would be a smash hit. I was half right. Scotty, lover of all things meat, gobbled his up, exclaiming that it was “probably the best fish ever.” Cartter, more of a pasta, cheese, and granola bar man, was less enthused.

Normally, I would have been more annoyed by the very expensive and well-prepared fish sitting uneaten on Cartter’s plate, but on this occasion, my would-be annoyance was mostly overwhelmed by the boys’ total enjoyment of our togetherness. Cartter laughed and laughed, and Scotty’s jaw dropped and his eyes bulged as the two of them invented a story about flying meat. When I interjected (it’s my table after all) and added embellishments involving Scotty growing huge muscles and meat sales going “through the roof,” the laughter intensified, and both boys stood to flex. Encouraged by their apparent joy and with Cartter’s full plate visible to my right, I continued, telling a tale of Cartter suffering sagging biceps, hair loss, and a generally Smeagol-like appearance due to a diet composed purely of Z bars. When I got to the bit about Smeagol, I paused, thinking I might have gone too far, but Cartter’s face was still frozen in a beaming smile. Then, as I looked into his eyes, it quite literally burst into tears. Shit.

Lately, Cartter’s been a little extra jealous of his younger brother, and my Smeagol comparison certainly hadn’t helped. Cartter enjoys being the star, the older one, the faster one, the smarter one, and he thrives on validation from his father. When I walk into our local pub/restaurant haunt to meet my family one Friday afternoon, Cartter pounds the seat next to him, signaling that he’s saved it for me. It’s delightful, but there’s a downside, namely that any indication of increasing closeness between Scotty and me seems to disturb him. As Danyelle says, “He doesn’t want to share you.” Well, sorry, little buddy. You have to.

The best part of the start to this school year has been the uptick in one-on-one time I’ve gotten with Scotty. I pick him up almost every day, and we get a half hour alone. The first day of this new routine, when Scotty climbed into the van at pick-up, he made an angry face and told me plainly that “I wanted Mommy to pick me up.” After a little snack of peanut butter and banana, though, he changed his tune to “I’m happy I’m with you.” We haven’t looked back. Our new routine includes hiding in one of the back rooms before Cartter gets home and comes to take Scotty away from me.

Thirty minutes, four times a week. That’s all I get. Next year, the boys will be in the same school until Cartter graduates if all goes to plan, and one-on-one time will be even scarcer. Right now, Danyelle has Scotty in the mornings. That will go away too. Both of us are enjoying as much of it as we can as we mourn the passing of Scotty’s babydom, much to Cartter’s chagrin.

Cartter is eager for Scotty to dump the baby stuff, because he’s disallowed himself from it. When Danyelle and I revisit some of the playlists that used to be the background music of our lives – Aristocats, Winnie the Pooh, Moana – Cartter awkwardly goes back and forth between his room and the kitchen, trying in vain to abduct Scotty, who quietly resists, preferring to sit at the counter listening, stifling smiles that the music evokes. Danyelle and I are, of course, tickled, remembering when he was 2 and choreographed an entire reenactment of the movie Dumbo to go with its soundtrack. We called it the Dumbo Ballet. It’s pleasurable for us to see our youngest be comfortable in his own skin even as Cartter insists it isn’t cool.

My dad says that things are easier for Scotty, because he “has Cartter in front blocking for him.” In other words, by the time Scotty reaches a certain age, he’s already seen Cartter go through it. The general idea makes sense, but Dad’s metaphor begs the question, what is it exactly that Cartter is blocking? I have a theory: It’s parental expectations. As Cartter makes his way through childhood, he is the first to encounter his parents’ expectations of each passing age. Those expectations haven’t been worked on by anything other than our own minds. By the time Scotty passes through any given age, Cartter’s already been there and not been exactly what we expected, and we’ve adjusted.

The theory would explain some of my own experience as a child. Being the oldest with one younger sibling, it often seemed to me that the bar was set lower for little sister, that her efforts and achievements were appreciated disproportionately to my own. For instance, I worked much harder in swimming and reached a much higher level, but Betsey was lauded as “more talented.” Likewise, I put in countless more hours on the piano and became a far better player than Betsey, but her playing was “more natural and less robotic.” According to the theory of diminishing parental expectations™, this unfair response to my sister and me is explained by parents’ natural tendency to calm the fuck down after the first kid and to set their expectations aside (to a degree), so while the oldest excels and fails to meet expectations, the youngest slacks and exceeds them.

As a kid I bore the brunt of my parents’ unfettered expectations. Now, Cartter bears the brunt of mine. I caught myself laying a classic line from my childhood on him the other day when he pitifully whined about being asked to clean up: “You’re too old to act that way.” It stopped him in his tracks for a moment, which in turn stopped me in mine. I realized that I would not likely say the same thing to Scotty. To the contrary Danyelle and I are both happy to see him hanging on to some of his babyish preferences. In one sense Cartter can’t grow up fast enough for us. In another, Scotty can’t grow up slow enough.

The impact of Cartter’s blocking is our unbalanced expectations, which work to nurture different personality traits in each child. Sadly, they probably enhance Cartter’s natural predisposition towards worrying. On the way to school last week, he told me, “Daddy, I worry every day.” I thought his self-awareness was encouraging, and when I asked him what he worried about, he told me, “I worry that the sun is going to shrink and explode and destroy the universe.” Apparently, he got this information from a science book in the school library. “There are books,” he said, “and they tell you these things.” Scotty, on the other hand is not worried about the destruction of the universe. He wants to know how seeds know how to grow grapes.

Another highly visible impact of our unbalanced parental expectations is the role they play in the sibling rivalry dynamic. Cartter, seeing our distribution of adoration as unfair, is all too quick to diminish his little brother. He sometimes tells Scotty that he is “the dumbest person in the whole world.” But, son, you know my sister Betsey, don’t you? Naturally, Danyelle and I come to Scotty’s defense. I’ve been telling Scotty lately that he is big and strong and smart no matter what Cartter says, and this, of course, just reinforces to Cartter that things are, in fact, very unfair.

When I told a story at the dinner table about Scotty getting huge muscles and Cartter turning into Smeagol, I hit a sore spot. I’d wanted to praise Scotty and goad Cartter into eating his meat, but I’d done it in a mean way that no doubt confirmed to Cartter that my love is biased. Quickly, I went into damage control mode, making a pleading apology to Cartter that I didn’t mean it, repeating that I was sorry, saying that Scotty was sorry. When I looked to my left, I saw that Scotty was on the edge of falling off an emotional cliff as well, eyes wide, mouth twitching like a Charlie Brown cartoon character about to cry. That’s when I dug deep and said what was truly in my heart: “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. I wish we could all stay right here at this table and talk and have this dinner forever and never die and this be heaven, because I love you.” A brief moment of stunned silence ensued; the tears did not return; and happy times continued. I’d pulled our evening out of the fire, and for a split second the four of us caught a glimpse of something that lives beneath my faulty expectations.

Miscellaneous:

On the Impact of Diminishing Parental Expectations: I’ll never forget the first time I attempted the old rope swing at Sapphire. I inched up the narrow trunk clutching the rope. A fall to either side into the rocky shallows would have meant a certain and possibly severe injury. I can see it perfectly in my mind’s eye. I jumped and didn’t hold myself up high enough, dragging my legs through the water and failing to achieve a full swing. What I don’t remember is my dad’s voice disappointedly calling to me from an inner tube in the lake as I nervously stalled before making the leap, “Come on, John.” It’s on the video that we have, though. I got better at the rope swing very quickly. I could never do back flips off it like Betsey, though.

On the kids being out of the house for six hours a day: I was initially very surprised at Sammy’s reaction when I came in the door after depositing Cartter at school. I’m not used to her being so affectionate and eager to play. She desperately rubbed herself on me and galloped off to get a tennis ball in her mouth and stare at me with doll eyes. It’s as if she was saying, “They’re not here to bother you now. You can play with me finally.”

Quotable: “I don’t like you, dude. I don’t want to be in the same room as you.” – My mother-in-law Trudy. Thanks, Trudy.