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Monday, February 4, 2013

Dealing with Sibling Rivalry.



So the Superbowl football game in the United States is done and dusted. The coaches of the two opposing teams were brothers; Jim Harbaugh and his elder sibling by fifteen months, John. 

Imagine the crap Mrs. Harbaugh must have had to put up with in the lead up to the game; the snide cracks under the breath at every opportunity, the shoving as they passed each other in the hall. 
Testosterone fuelled rivalry reigns with a mighty hand in this household where all four lads are about eighteen months apart in age. 

The intense pecking order is exemplified in innumerable locations and circumstances. Who rides shotgun? Who gets jurisdiction of the remote control? Who gets the big bedroom when someone moves out? 


I could run tours of the house highlighting holes in walls and doors that bear witness to each free-for-all fracas that took place.

The boys had their own distinctive approaches to brotherly combat, and each style was equally malicious. 

Thaddeus was the more passive aggressive of the four. At twelve years of age he was a bit of a techno prodigy and could manipulate programs on the computer that none of the rest of us could figure out how to reverse. 

Using autocorrect he replaced Jonah’s name with ‘dickhead’ and Hagar’s with ‘behemoth’ making it a very aggravating task for them to do their homework. Sick of the constant brawling and verbal slanging matches Thaddeus attempted ‘brainwashing techniques’ by installing an application that flashed an alleged two- second, subliminal screen message promoting ‘peace’ on the screen. 

It failed.

At fifteen he obtained his black belt in Taekwondo and coming to his senses he finally adopted a less pacifist attitude, delivering the occasional front snap kick in the nuts.

Jonah was a little more sinister in his assault methods. 

Taking a full box of staples from my desk he created hundreds of tiny twisted jacks which he used to booby trap every centimetre of Hagar’s carpet. 

Excuse the French but I was f#*king, p#*ed off when I walked into H’s bedroom, barefoot, to put the washing away.

“Hagar the Brazen” was much more unsophisticated and his strategies were not nearly as well orchestrated. 

Even so, gifted as he was in the art of provocation, he could effortlessly raise the ire of the hotheaded, nine year old Padraic.

His favourite taunt was to lock Padraic out in the back yard and watch him getting red-faced and crying through the sliding glass doors. Now it’s all fun and games until something gets broken, which it unsurprisingly did. 

Padraic belted the reinforced glass door so hard he put a metre-long crack in it. After hiding across the road behind a tree in disgrace for about two hours he ultimately returned to face the music. Not that it was entirely his fault.

 Padraic is turning eighteen tomorrow and a miracle has transpired. 

Yesterday big bro’ Hagar walked in with a surprise eighteenth birthday present for Padraic. 

This is the first time Hagar has ever outlayed any of his hard-earned moolah on any of his brothers and I am thrilled.

Okay… it’s a dirty big bottle bottle of vodka but it’s a start!