Enjoying siblings separately

The three-hour canoe ride with my daughters Sally, age five, and Marie, eight, had been nicely eventful.

We’d eaten mulberries from branches that drooped low over the lake. We’d seen a turtle sliding off a rock, a dead fish floating near shore, and what may have been a water snake just below the surface. We’d eaten ice cream cones on a lakeside bench and, when we were leaving, a confused frog had leaped into the boat where I pursued it among my shrieking daughters.

Later, Sally had accidentally peed in the boat and I gave her a muddy hip bath in the shallows.

Plainly our little voyage had been just about perfect, but my enjoyment of these adventures had been dampened by the bickering and ill-will that flowed between the two sisters whenever the action waned.

The ugliness peaked at the end when I was wrestling the canoe onto the car’s roof and stowing the paddles and lifejackets in the trunk. The girls seemed to be competing to see which one could be less helpful to me and more annoying to each other, and I was getting angry.

Back home, while I was rinsing (flushing) the canoe with the garden hose, I said to Marie, “So. Was this fun?”

“Well,” she said, “It wasn’t fun for me, except for the mulberries and the ice cream.”

“So if I gave you that kind of food, you’d just as soon stay home?” I asked with more thrust than I usually use on a child.

“Well, sort of,” she said. “But then you and Sally would come back and be talking about all the fun you’d had and then I’d feel bad.”

“So in other words,” I said, with the clever nastiness of a prosecutor, “It’s worth it to you to go along just to make sure that Sally doesn’t have a good time.” (And parents wonder why their kids don’t want to talk to them.)

Of course that wasn’t what she meant, but the fact remains that it’s hard to enjoy my children while Marie darkly begrudges her younger sister any pleasure or attention, and Sally is shrilly adamant about claiming a little more than her share of whatever there is.

I had a first-rate childhood, and I can’t complain. But it’s too bad that my dad never deliberately experienced any of his three sons separately when we were young. Nevertheless, Dad and I were thrown together for one special adventure.

I was a half-naked six-year-old playing in the front-yard of our brand-new house. The builders had left a big dirt pile there, and I was spending a pleasant evening rolling down it.

My entertainment was interrupted when a sharp piece of metal, hidden in the soft dirt, penetrated my bodily grime and ripped a two-inch gash in my chest. Dad put a washcloth over the bleeding wound, and I held it there while we drove through the darkness toward the hospital. Sharing the camaraderie of the front seat, where children rarely sat, we maintained my courage by singing military songs like “The Marine Corps Hymn” and “This Is the Army, Mr. Jones.”

He held my hand during the stitching and, both much relieved, we chatted companionably on the way home.

Taken all together, including the fear and pain, I never enjoyed his company more. But a bulldozer flattened out Laceration Hill, and my unfortunate dad went back to handling his three boys as a unit—that is, as a quarrelsome bloc called “You Kids.”

The day after the boat ride, I arranged for my wife to take Sally to visit Cousin Dave while I took Marie to the zoo. That might sound like a raw deal for Sally, but you don’t know her cousin.

Imagine a Golden Retriever turned into a 10-year-old boy and you have Cousin Dave.

So while Sally was romping happily with her favorite relative, Marie and I shared a wonderful time wandering among more exotic creatures.

We made an afternoon-long game of pretending to be shopping for a household pet, and Marie finally decided she’d like “a nice wolf that wouldn’t bite” (which left out the specimens on display, who all looked socially unreliable in the extreme). In the souvenir shop, Marie bought a pennant with a tiger-face on it, and I picked out a handsome wallet made out of imitation zebra skin. Out of her mother’s nutritional sphere of influence, Marie had her first sno-cone. On the drive home, we played Twenty Questions, a game we’d discontinued when Sally had become old enough to barge into it.

Sally likewise has proven to be excellent company when I get her away from the ugly competition with her big sister.

We’ve gone canoeing and made a couple of trips downtown on our wheeled ponies, “Spike” and “Blue.” Away from her oppressor, Sally’s plaintive, grasping, chip-on-the-shoulder quality recedes and her bright and charming side comes forward. It’s easy to miss out on these pleasures because of the inefficiency of one-on-one activity. With only so much time for children, it makes sense to parent your kids en masse.

Besides, parents (myself included) yearn after the elusive ideal of “family fun.” It’s worth pursuing, but we have to realize what we’re up against. All too often it means gathering three, four, or more people of different ages and interests, some of whom don’t even LIKE each other, and seeking places and activities that will be universally satisfactory.

As for family vacations, YOU might be putting some distance between yourself and your boss, but your children are stuck like glue to theirs. And while YOU get a respite from office politics, your kids are forced into closer-than-ever contact with some of the most treacherous rivals who ever shifted blame or stole credit.

I’m sure there are families in which children treat each other the way you’d dreamed yours would. But in the families I see, the siblings generally see each other as obstacles instead of playmates and act accordingly. How do you enjoy such children?

One at a time.