Fighting the Good Fight

My children are loud people.

It is rare when my house is quiet (although, right this second, it is! Julia is reading and V is playing trains and you could hear a pin drop!!!). With five people under this roof, there is a lot of talking, laughing, crying, singing, bickering, hollering, storytelling, more bickering, screaming and general chaos.


I am very upfront that I know I, myself, am a very loud person. I would always tell the people who interviewed me for teaching positions that I'm loud--I'm loud when I'm happy, loud when I'm excited, loud when I'm frustrated. I felt I owed it to them to know in advance that they were not hiring a quiet, peaceful teacher.


However, my house is loudest when my children are bickering and lately that feels like all the freaking time.

They wake up and start fighting.

They sit by each other and fight.

They fight from opposite sides of the house.

They fight outside, inside, at the store, at the library.

One time, when we were at a hotel, Elisabeth and Julia were both sleep talking and it sounded like bickering!

I am no stranger to sibling bickering. It is the chosen language of me and my own sister. It is a part of being in a family and having siblings--there will be fighting, hurt feelings, frustration. But one thing that Evan and I both feel strongly about is that there should never be any bullying and that, in general, you should always be respectful and kind--even to your siblings.

While our theory is all good and whatnot, actually teaching it to our offspring is a battle. I find that we are constantly repeating ourselves to what seem to be deaf ears. We also are saying the same things to 6.5 year old Julia about how she treats Vivian that we had to tell a younger Elisabeth about how she was treating a toddler Julia.

Full circle, people. This means we'll definitely be telling 6.5 year old Vivian to be nice to her three year old brother.

As much as I dislike repeating myself and as much as I feel like I am not being heard, every now and then there is a glimmer of hope that maybe my words are sinking in; moments when I hear them correcting their tone from being rude to kind, when I hear them trying their best to compromise, when I hear them saying yes to a younger sibling asking them to play when I know they really want to say no.

One thing I always tell the older two girls (every day, a million times a day) is that they will be siblings FOREVER. They will be talking, listening, dealing with each other until the end of time. As the oldest, Elisabeth has a heavier load because all of the kiddos will be looking up to her. She has had the most experience dealing with younger siblings and needs to set an example of how to deal with persistent toddlers and pesky grade school sibling antics. We talk a lot about how she communicates with them is how they are learning to communicate with those younger than them. And that sometimes you have to make sacrifices--like playing trains with your toddler sister when you'd rather hole up in your room and listen to music or let your elementary aged sister hang out in your room with you while you clean. How she talks to them and treats them is going to have a bigger impact than how their friends treat them.


Something that is hard to understand, that took me a while to understand before I could teach it to my kids, is that building up these relationships now is the basis for how they will treat each other as grown ups. The same annoying traits and habits that they want to punch their sisters in the face for now are just going to become annoying adult habits that will most likely still make them want to punch their sister. But, with each time they successfully compromise, with each time they sacrifice their time or their own wants for a sibling, with each act of grace they show, they aren't just building up their relationships with each other, they are learning and practicing how to be better people (which I hear is what the whole goal of parenting really is--raising good people). And who doesn't want to have their adult siblings be awesome people to turn to?


So for each rare, unicorn sighting moment when my children are all getting along and there is peace in the land, I am taking it as a victory. And a chance for my ears to stop bleeding from the last sibling bickering battle.