Why Won't My Kids Just Get Along?

"She punched me!"

"Get her to stop staring at me!"

"You should give her consequences!"

"I wish I didn't have a sister!"

Once again, in the blink of an eye, yet another peaceful afternoon has dissolved into war.

I am the father of two young girls and my wife and I are so amazingly fortunate to have these two cute, funny and wonderful girls, but I'd be lying to you if I said it was cute, funny and wonderful all the time. After careful consideration, I decided not to lie to you...again.

Most of the time we have so much fun together and, as I have written in the past, I will miss these days tremendously when the girls are grown up. My two girls spend so much time together and generally get along really well. They create intricate games of make believe and could spend days on end at the beach, in the backyard or at the local park as if joined at the hip. Each other's partners in crime, they are super silly and funny together and can get so crazy and full of laughter as they cackle at something random. Or they can easily spend quiet time together like just before bed lying next to each other on the couch quietly reading without a care in the world or playing with their large stuffed animal collection or helping me prepare dinner. As I said, a huge amount of the time, they are best friends as well as sisters.

Except when they aren't.

At the drop of a hat and for no obviously good reason, they fight. One moment they are the closest of sisters and the next, they are pinching and pulling and smacking and kicking. I'll look over at them on the rug and they are playing a game and having a great time, then I'll look away and, in a heartbeat, I hear yelling and screaming and crying. And it is totally random and unpredictable much of the time too - one second, no issues and literally seconds later one is crying and the other is screaming, and both are wanting dad to punish the other.

I have spent so much time wondering and exclaiming aloud in varying degrees of frustration the age old question "Why can't you just get along?1?!"

When things are going well, it all seems so easy, eerily so. They are usually so well-mannered and caring, which elicits responses from passersby what wonderfully polite kids they are, complete with a nod towards the parents who made it all happen. When things are going well, a monkey could parent them, and not one of those well-trained monkeys either, a regular old plain one. I've been known to take a step back and give myself multiple pats on the back for yet another day of incredible parenting. Which are not to be confused with the pats on the back that I get for being a good boy. 

I love when they get along, but those times also have a slightly-unsettled, calm-before-the-storm feel to them. I'm often reminded of what a fellow teacher told me in my first week of teaching all those years ago after I complained about the challenging behaviours in one of my classes - "if your classes were all easy all the time, they wouldn't pay you". To which I replied "we are getting paid?" I was so naive in my youth.

As much as I like to believe that my dream of us spending all of our time dancing together with flower crowns of posies in our hair, surrounded by birds chirping, harps playing, bunnies hoping and plentiful free high-quality sushi, I know that just isn't real. It's probably impossible for any number of people, no matter how much they adore and love each other to get along all the time. Especially when those people spend disproportionate amount of time voluntarily confined in a relatively small roofed shelter. I blame our roof for lots of stuff. 

We could be easily confused for the most loving, caring family in the world, especially if the viewer is easily confused at the best of times. Until something goes wrong, someone is tired or somebody decides to bother the other as a form of sport or leisure activity or way to pass the time until dinner is served. Now, we all have our bad days, our overly sensitive moments, and our fleeting thoughts of running away to join the circus (do people still do this, and if so, approximately how much running is involved?). 

We have all spent considerable time and therapy hours wondering how we got here - trapped in a small townhouse with a large mortgage surrounded by crazy animals and Barbies. We have all had those moments where we miss our single days with huge expanses of free time where the toughest decisions revolved around how much chocolate should one unshaven man in his 20s consume while watching hours of basketball in his underwear or if I should go to the gym before meeting my friend for coffee or after seeing a matinee. 

Don't get me wrong (unless it brings you pleasure), I love having kids - I often tell people, a bit too aggressively at times, that fathering my children is easily the best thing I've ever done, even if I don't totally understand the intricacies of the science behind it (I feel the same way about wireless printers). It's just that when you have a headache and the kids are attempting to bounce each other off the walls against their will like some sort of game of European Handball and you have to rush to prepare a dinner that neither will eat when all you want to do is hide inside the linen closet, I sort of long for a simpler existence. 

And, if I allow myself a moment of selfishness (each Thursday between 4:00 and 4:15pm, to be precise), haven't we parents earned plenty of stress-free weekday mornings, peaceful afternoons and easy bedtime routines? Yes, we have! In our day, we changed hundreds of absolutely disgusting diapers; we treated dozens of a-little-too-much-information rashes on nether regions; we have cooked meal after meal after meal when all we wanted to do was curl up in a fetal position in the corner of the laundry room (it's a great back stretch). And do we get thanks for all of this? Yes, if you consider the girls pulling each other's hair, occasionally wishing for a different set of parents and piercing each other's skin count with an ever-growing list of objects (they do in my books).

Or maybe it's all our fault (stop nodding your head!). Nobody trained us to be parents. It's not like we had any special qualifications or degrees to prepare us for all of this. I still remember returning home from the hospital with our first born and looking everywhere for an owner's manual. Sure we read books (or more accurately, skimmed through books to look at the pictures  -so that is what a C-section is!?!?), did Google image searches (it's research, sicko!) and hung around other parents at the playground who looked like they knew what they were doing all the while attempting to not appear too creepy. But in the end, we just figured it out, worked hard and did our best (I recently decided to get a t-shirt made saying "I'm doing my best!" in large letters). But seriously, I believe we've done a good job, but then again, that could just be a result of years of brainwashing - thanks mom!

But we are trying to pull off something quite challenging - spending a lot of time together as a family in this day and age of smart phones, YouTube and Netflix. It would almost definitely lessen the strife and stress and in-fighting if we interacted for only a few minutes a day. But, like war heroes, we parents are constantly having our family do things together and we are literally in each other's faces all the time, in the most positive way possible. Both my wife and I come from families that believed in regularly scheduled and regimented family time - eating pancake breakfasts together, playing games together and shopping for discount sporting goods together. Like many of you, I spent hours as a teen dreaming of future family dinners full of laughter, witty retorts and tofurky. I never thought I'd be a dad compelled to write blog posts about my kids not getting along. That would have been a very precise, odd and ahead-of-one's-time thought to have back in 1987.

Maybe the sheer amount of time the girls are "forced" to be with each other naturally produces some meltdowns? Possibly it is like we are trying to operate a nuclear power plant and no matter how adept my wife and I are at running the power plant (I took notes!), as we all know, there are bound to be horrible, horrible environmental disasters. Maybe brutal sibling conflict is just unavoidable, and instead of trying to avoid it as we have been (again, remember, no parenting training at all) we should embrace it in all of its loud, screaming glory? Instead of getting frustrated and raising one's voice with demonic anger and becoming a part of the problem, I should sit back, relax and light a cigar and enjoy the extra musky masculinity juxtaposed with the youthful cries for help.

Another truth in all of this, is that we are often toughest on those we love. For example, I am a strict taskmaster with all of my cousins. No one gets off easy. The girls are always well behaved at school and we receive glowing reports of how helpful, lovely and nice they are when not around us. I want to reply to the teachers "what have you been smoking?", but then I remember that I really don't need to know the answer to that question anyhow. Many of us operate with the mindset that our loved ones will always love us unconditionally no matter how crappy we treat each other. I blame Adam and Eve for this misconception (I blame them for everything). We also know that we can't treat friends and acquaintances and Social Studies teachers the same way. So, when we leave the house, we put on a happy face, draw pages of happy faces to show our teacher/boss/parole officer or just "pretend" to like everyone. And then after a long, exhausting, full day of "acting" nice to everyone, we let it all out at home.

My wife and I were initially quite worried that they would act towards others as they did with one another, but, aside from a few tough days, they have always been able to be civil in public and reserve their emotional moments for mom and dad to deal with. Now, I'm not suggesting this is totally a conscious decision, because that would require a whole lot more consciousness then our family is currently capable of. Mornings and evenings are the worst times for the two girls as far as getting along with each other is concerned because that is when they are the most tired, and when the most tired, the least good at biting their tongue or turning the other cheek or some sort of expression involving one's elbows. Not that I love this, but I'd much rather them be difficult with each other around me and easy for all other adults and kids, because it is contained and, when necessary, I can just hose them off (when I finally get that fire engine hose installed in our backyard). 

Due to my wife changing careers and my always having summers off, the three of us - myself and my kids - have spent a lot of time together - getting ready for school in the mornings, at dinner and bedtimes and throughout weekends and school breaks. I drive them to dance classes, practice squash and piano with them and spend hours on the floor playing games. I'm teaching them how to cook, helping them with homework and have been reading them bedtime stories since they were babies. So, having spent so much time with the two of them, I can see that each possesses an intricate knowledge of each other's weaknesses. They know each other's sensitivities inside out; the buttons to press, the feathers to ruffle, the chalkboards to scratch with their nails. As close-knit sisters it's as if they each have a Ph.D in the other's emotional states, detailed blueprints of the weaknesses in their defense strategies as well as having the code to access the nuclear missiles needed to start World War 3.

But, even though the know each other as well as any two people could, and though they can get to the other in ways no one else can, they absolutely love each other. So, back to my original question, why can't they just get along? Why must they sprinkle in these seemingly random annoying moments of vindictive knit-pickiness? Why can't they remember, just when they are about to hit, bug, annoy, ruin, scratch, rip, hurt, break something the other cares about or owns, that this is their only sister in the world whom they were just laughing and playing with? My wife and I have pondered these questions for hours, with no great answers. We've learned over time some strategies for mitigating the disasters and how to apply timely and meaningful consequences that have an impact. We've also discovered the wonders of purchasing large vats of industrial strength glue. Don't ask.

One hope I have is that they are always close and are always friends. It means a lot to me and I believe that it will happen. And there is some progress, if one looks closely enough and chooses to ignore other details. As the kids age, that they are slightly more receptive to advice and teaching and figuring out more proactive ways to cope when the other starts frustrating them. Not that it is easy. Just as I started writing this, the younger kid decided to would be funny to break the Lego house of the older one without asking, so the older one decided to scribble all over a beautiful drawing the younger one spent a lot of time on. And they both ran to mom crying.

I'll miss this one day, right?