Follow the leader: second children often emulate their older siblings, who resent them
When I had my first child—a daughter, Marlene, now nearly two years old—I hit on what seemed to me an effective metaphor for what was going on. I was moving from a Ptolemaic universe into a Copernican one. Before you have a child, you are the centre of your own universe: everything revolves around you. Parenthood gives you the proper—the Copernican—sense of your marginality. This new thing takes its place, and you are in orbit around it.
I went on to realise—a much more important realisation—that the nature of new parenthood is that you think you’re the first person it’s ever happened to, and there is nothing you can think about it that hasn’t been thought already. A friend to whom I was expounding my theory, said: “Yes, yes, I know someone who calls it ‘a Copernican revolution of the self.’”
Well. The image stands. The first child is a cataclysm: a great reversal. The cliché is that “nothing prepares you for it,” but actually everything prepares you for it, or tries to. When the editors of Sunday supplements seek parenthood columnists they look to new dads or first-time mums. When people tell you their boring stories (which you put up with because there’s a quid pro quo: you get to bore them with yours) they come under the rubric of “becoming a father” or “becoming a mother.”
It’s the second child, actually, that nothing prepares you for. It’s regarded as less of a deal, a repetition, albeit a happy one: more of the same. And yet it isn’t. It’s new in a more profound and less discussed way.
To go back to my initial image, you’re adding another heavenly body to the astrolabe. This is a less dramatic but—it stands to reason—a much more complex transformation. The bonds of love and rivalry, care and dependence that are, in this little universe, the forces of gravity, are now acting on mother and father and two children and in complex ways between each and all four of them. You’re not dealing with three relationships: you’re dealing with six.
We do recognise that, but only at a more or less subliminal level. One thing I felt strongly before the arrival of the second, for instance, was a change in the way I conceived of us as a unit. We had been, hitherto, a couple with a child. With two kids, I felt, we’d earn the name of “a family.”
But in terms of front-of-the-mind thinking, the arrival of a second child is taken somewhat for granted in our culture. What makes it unique—and trickier than the first in terms of what you expect, and how you feel, and how you manage—gets occluded; as second children themselves can do.
Even the advice you get tends to be about managing its effect on the first child: don’t let your first one see you fussing over the new arrival; shower her with extra attention and love; keep an eye out for first child/second child/sharp object interactions. (Surely every family has a version of the tale told in mine, of my infant uncle being intercepted having not only found but loaded his dad’s shotgun and explaining: “I’m going to kill the baby.”)
We hear much about the psychologies of the oldest child, the youngest child, the only child. What, though, of the second child? My younger brother Alex—there’s two and a half years between us—has always had the family nickname l’invisible. His catchphrases are “HeelllOOO!” or, as we talk about him as if he’s not in the room: “I’m… RIGHT… HERE.” At his wedding, I made much of his invisibility as a running joke in my best man’s speech. I was being an older brother: celebrating, colluding, stealing laughs, showing off at my younger brother’s expense.
That’s what we do, we first children. We hog the limelight. The lives of our siblings, in childhood, are cycles of worshipful emulation and serial rejection. Naturally, the second child tries to give himself shape with reference to the elder sibling, and is resented for it. “Stop COPYING ME!” is the infuriated shriek with which he is asked to efface the self he’s trying to construct, by the very model around which he’s trying to construct it. “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”
A second child is shaped by a predecessor not only in him or herself, I suspect, but as far as his or her parents go. Is what you expect from a second child, what you want or fear, ineluctably shaped by the first? Is a second child necessarily secondary?
***
My locus standi, here, is not calm reflection after years of experience, but being in tiger-gripping, nappy-wrangling, posset-wiping, bum-cream-smearing medias res. At the time of writing my son Max is three weeks old. So I’m at the beginning of the process that ends with my knowing it all.
I think there’s some value in writing it down now—at just the point at which the abstract idea of the second child is becoming concrete. For I will forget that point: I will forget what it’s like to be here. Because one of the things about parenting is that you forget, constantly.
What did we do, you ask yourself, when she was little—when she slept 16 hours a day? How come it felt like we were so busy? You remember incidents but not when they happened—and not the day-to-day texture of life. You have forgotten the washing and cooking and washing and cooking, the scrambled egg nappies and the vomit, the walking up and down the stairs again and again with the high, tremulous, unceasing, not-quite-human sound of a newborn’s cry at your shoulder. Friends with younger children ask: “What did she do at four months?” or “When she was six months, did she behave like that?” You have no idea.
That forgetfulness goes all through the process. Each situation that arises cancels other possibilities out. When one child is asleep on your chest and the other playing sweetly in the sunshine in the park, you can’t imagine anything but bliss; when both are throwing shit-fits and you haven’t slept properly for weeks, you can’t remember ever not having been in despair.
As with the parent, so with the child. Parenthood is, in a way, a long process of mourning. “It goes so fast,” people say, and they sound sad. The child in the photograph, six months ago, is not the child patiently spooning yoghurt into its ear at the table beside you. The child six months ago was a different child from the one you lifted for the first time into a plastic hospital bassinet. Versions of your daughter quietly unselve and disappear, week in week out, and are replaced by new ones that you love as much, and in whose features you can trace the likeness of the ones you lost.
Marlene now says “gogaly” and “cooloo” and “pingo” and “peacarry” for “gone” and “squirrel” and “kaleidoscope” and “pick me up.” In a few weeks, she will not. Perhaps we’ll try to capture the odd usage on tape, but most likely we won’t get round to it, and they will vanish for good. We will remember them, probably—or try to. She will not. As an adult, my daughter will remember nothing at all of the life we share now. So, one fear: are you looking to the second child, in some subliminal way, to be an aide-memoire, a ghost of the first, an attempt to recapture the experience?
You spend the first few months of your first child’s life panicking. You agonise: “Is that a purple rash? Or a red one?” You debate whether crying is a good reason for a visit to A&E. You think, basically, that a stiff breeze has a better-than-even chance of killing your offspring. And a whole industry exists to assuage and exploit these fears. It says: what if your child died? Wouldn’t you feel bad if you hadn’t taken this precaution? It’s unlikely—yes. But what if? What if you didn’t buy our product and your child died? Think how you’d feel.
It sells you cat nets (two sizes; Moses basket and cot). It sells you sterilisers. It sells you monitors that scream if your child stops breathing. It sells you reins and ropes and reinforcements, stairgates and socket-locks. It sells you hypoallergenic fabrics and eggs that glow arctic blue if the nursery is a degree colder than the optimal temperature for the preservation of newborn life.
So you think, second time round, that you’ll see these merchants coming. You will be a bit more relaxed. One of the benefits of that—it’s an impulse, at least, that I can identify in myself—is the hope that going over the process a second time, when you know slightly better what you’re doing, will give you the chance to pay closer attention. If you’re not terrified of crashing the car, you’ll be better able to enjoy looking out of the window. The ratio of pleasure to fear will be higher; you’ll live more in the moment; notice more of the detail.
Rather than a reboot of the experience of the first, perhaps it’s more kindly thought of as an opportunity to live the experience of parenthood—at once entirely generic and entirely particular—differently: to relearn what you forgot. As you heft a baby onto your left forearm, you think: “Yes. I remember this.” But even as you remember, the quality of light outside the window has changed.
One of the things you worry about in advance is: “How could I ever love a second child as much as the first?” People will warn you about this, and will promise: “Amazingly, you just do.” You don’t quite believe them: for while the child is in utero—an abstract proposition, an idea of a child—you can’t feel about it as you feel about a living human with a name and a chin. You think of it as secondary. It is, for the moment, invisible.
But then it becomes a person, and: “Amazingly, you just do.”
When I had my first child—a daughter, Marlene, now nearly two years old—I hit on what seemed to me an effective metaphor for what was going on. I was moving from a Ptolemaic universe into a Copernican one. Before you have a child, you are the centre of your own universe: everything revolves around you. Parenthood gives you the proper—the Copernican—sense of your marginality. This new thing takes its place, and you are in orbit around it.
I went on to realise—a much more important realisation—that the nature of new parenthood is that you think you’re the first person it’s ever happened to, and there is nothing you can think about it that hasn’t been thought already. A friend to whom I was expounding my theory, said: “Yes, yes, I know someone who calls it ‘a Copernican revolution of the self.’”
Well. The image stands. The first child is a cataclysm: a great reversal. The cliché is that “nothing prepares you for it,” but actually everything prepares you for it, or tries to. When the editors of Sunday supplements seek parenthood columnists they look to new dads or first-time mums. When people tell you their boring stories (which you put up with because there’s a quid pro quo: you get to bore them with yours) they come under the rubric of “becoming a father” or “becoming a mother.”
It’s the second child, actually, that nothing prepares you for. It’s regarded as less of a deal, a repetition, albeit a happy one: more of the same. And yet it isn’t. It’s new in a more profound and less discussed way.
To go back to my initial image, you’re adding another heavenly body to the astrolabe. This is a less dramatic but—it stands to reason—a much more complex transformation. The bonds of love and rivalry, care and dependence that are, in this little universe, the forces of gravity, are now acting on mother and father and two children and in complex ways between each and all four of them. You’re not dealing with three relationships: you’re dealing with six.
We do recognise that, but only at a more or less subliminal level. One thing I felt strongly before the arrival of the second, for instance, was a change in the way I conceived of us as a unit. We had been, hitherto, a couple with a child. With two kids, I felt, we’d earn the name of “a family.”
But in terms of front-of-the-mind thinking, the arrival of a second child is taken somewhat for granted in our culture. What makes it unique—and trickier than the first in terms of what you expect, and how you feel, and how you manage—gets occluded; as second children themselves can do.
Even the advice you get tends to be about managing its effect on the first child: don’t let your first one see you fussing over the new arrival; shower her with extra attention and love; keep an eye out for first child/second child/sharp object interactions. (Surely every family has a version of the tale told in mine, of my infant uncle being intercepted having not only found but loaded his dad’s shotgun and explaining: “I’m going to kill the baby.”)
We hear much about the psychologies of the oldest child, the youngest child, the only child. What, though, of the second child? My younger brother Alex—there’s two and a half years between us—has always had the family nickname l’invisible. His catchphrases are “HeelllOOO!” or, as we talk about him as if he’s not in the room: “I’m… RIGHT… HERE.” At his wedding, I made much of his invisibility as a running joke in my best man’s speech. I was being an older brother: celebrating, colluding, stealing laughs, showing off at my younger brother’s expense.
That’s what we do, we first children. We hog the limelight. The lives of our siblings, in childhood, are cycles of worshipful emulation and serial rejection. Naturally, the second child tries to give himself shape with reference to the elder sibling, and is resented for it. “Stop COPYING ME!” is the infuriated shriek with which he is asked to efface the self he’s trying to construct, by the very model around which he’s trying to construct it. “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”
A second child is shaped by a predecessor not only in him or herself, I suspect, but as far as his or her parents go. Is what you expect from a second child, what you want or fear, ineluctably shaped by the first? Is a second child necessarily secondary?
***
My locus standi, here, is not calm reflection after years of experience, but being in tiger-gripping, nappy-wrangling, posset-wiping, bum-cream-smearing medias res. At the time of writing my son Max is three weeks old. So I’m at the beginning of the process that ends with my knowing it all.
I think there’s some value in writing it down now—at just the point at which the abstract idea of the second child is becoming concrete. For I will forget that point: I will forget what it’s like to be here. Because one of the things about parenting is that you forget, constantly.
What did we do, you ask yourself, when she was little—when she slept 16 hours a day? How come it felt like we were so busy? You remember incidents but not when they happened—and not the day-to-day texture of life. You have forgotten the washing and cooking and washing and cooking, the scrambled egg nappies and the vomit, the walking up and down the stairs again and again with the high, tremulous, unceasing, not-quite-human sound of a newborn’s cry at your shoulder. Friends with younger children ask: “What did she do at four months?” or “When she was six months, did she behave like that?” You have no idea.
That forgetfulness goes all through the process. Each situation that arises cancels other possibilities out. When one child is asleep on your chest and the other playing sweetly in the sunshine in the park, you can’t imagine anything but bliss; when both are throwing shit-fits and you haven’t slept properly for weeks, you can’t remember ever not having been in despair.
As with the parent, so with the child. Parenthood is, in a way, a long process of mourning. “It goes so fast,” people say, and they sound sad. The child in the photograph, six months ago, is not the child patiently spooning yoghurt into its ear at the table beside you. The child six months ago was a different child from the one you lifted for the first time into a plastic hospital bassinet. Versions of your daughter quietly unselve and disappear, week in week out, and are replaced by new ones that you love as much, and in whose features you can trace the likeness of the ones you lost.
Marlene now says “gogaly” and “cooloo” and “pingo” and “peacarry” for “gone” and “squirrel” and “kaleidoscope” and “pick me up.” In a few weeks, she will not. Perhaps we’ll try to capture the odd usage on tape, but most likely we won’t get round to it, and they will vanish for good. We will remember them, probably—or try to. She will not. As an adult, my daughter will remember nothing at all of the life we share now. So, one fear: are you looking to the second child, in some subliminal way, to be an aide-memoire, a ghost of the first, an attempt to recapture the experience?
You spend the first few months of your first child’s life panicking. You agonise: “Is that a purple rash? Or a red one?” You debate whether crying is a good reason for a visit to A&E. You think, basically, that a stiff breeze has a better-than-even chance of killing your offspring. And a whole industry exists to assuage and exploit these fears. It says: what if your child died? Wouldn’t you feel bad if you hadn’t taken this precaution? It’s unlikely—yes. But what if? What if you didn’t buy our product and your child died? Think how you’d feel.
It sells you cat nets (two sizes; Moses basket and cot). It sells you sterilisers. It sells you monitors that scream if your child stops breathing. It sells you reins and ropes and reinforcements, stairgates and socket-locks. It sells you hypoallergenic fabrics and eggs that glow arctic blue if the nursery is a degree colder than the optimal temperature for the preservation of newborn life.
So you think, second time round, that you’ll see these merchants coming. You will be a bit more relaxed. One of the benefits of that—it’s an impulse, at least, that I can identify in myself—is the hope that going over the process a second time, when you know slightly better what you’re doing, will give you the chance to pay closer attention. If you’re not terrified of crashing the car, you’ll be better able to enjoy looking out of the window. The ratio of pleasure to fear will be higher; you’ll live more in the moment; notice more of the detail.
Rather than a reboot of the experience of the first, perhaps it’s more kindly thought of as an opportunity to live the experience of parenthood—at once entirely generic and entirely particular—differently: to relearn what you forgot. As you heft a baby onto your left forearm, you think: “Yes. I remember this.” But even as you remember, the quality of light outside the window has changed.
One of the things you worry about in advance is: “How could I ever love a second child as much as the first?” People will warn you about this, and will promise: “Amazingly, you just do.” You don’t quite believe them: for while the child is in utero—an abstract proposition, an idea of a child—you can’t feel about it as you feel about a living human with a name and a chin. You think of it as secondary. It is, for the moment, invisible.
But then it becomes a person, and: “Amazingly, you just do.”
