Triumphs and Failures Tuesday: Protective big brother
It's Tuesday, so you know what that means. Your favorite weekly-ish parenting-blog feature is back: Triumphs and Failures Tuesday! Where I share a parenting triumph or failure.
This week: a triumph. Wait, that doesn't sound quite triumphant. Picture me standing atop a mountain summit, foot on a rocky outcrop in a Captain-Morgan pose, raising my hands in the air, exclaiming, "Triumph!" with my voice reverberating around the mountain range. That is how big a triumph this is to me.
G, my almost-six-month old, started daycare yesterday. And, aside from the somewhat arduous task of getting all the supplies ready for his first day (I'm sure first-day-school-supply shopping gets easier as they get older, right?), G’s first day went off without a hitch.
Because Laya and I wanted to get G started in daycare before the yearly "move-ups (i.e., when the kids move up to the older-kids class)," the school placed him with the teachers he's going to be with but in a class of 1-year olds. And the class loved G. The teachers said they were all curious and excited to have a baby in the class. Mr. Popular before he's even 1? He's certainly doing better than I ever did.
Having my kid's first day of school go well is certainly triumphant, but the triumph I'm proud of involves G’s older brother, X.
X was excited to have G go to the same school as him. When I dropped X off at his classroom, I had G with me. And X was visibly upset that G wasn't staying in class with him. He was pleading with me to leave G there, but I told him that his baby brother had to go to his own classroom. Downtrodden but seemingly understanding, X relented.
What impressed me was X’s behavior when, after picking up G from his classroom, I came to pick up X. As I entered X's class, from across the room, X exclaimed, "Baby G," ran over, and hugged and kissed his little brother. X’s classmates were excited to see a baby, and they crowded around one of X's teachers after I gave G to her to hold while I got X's things. All the kids wanted to see and touch this new, foreign baby.
Immediately, X got in front of the other kids, grabbed one of G’s hanging feet, and, in a loud and authoritative tone, said, "Zabia's baby bruddah! Zabia's baby bruddah!" And it seemed like he was trying to create some space between them and the rest of the class. To me, I saw an older brother protecting his younger brother, shielding him from potential danger.
In that moment, I felt that Laya and I were doing things right, unlike the hundreds of other moments when I'm like, "What the heck am I even doing? Argh!" In that moment, I felt that I had gotten through to X when I told him how valuable family is and how he and his baby brother were going to have a special bond. In that moment, I felt that X and G would be alright in the future, that they would have each other's backs when Laya and I weren't there to protect them.
Sure, maybe you could interpret the scene as something less powerful as brother protecting brother. And, yes, I know that there will be fights in their future, maybe even fights that escalate to blows. But something tells me X knows his role as Kuya/big brother as long as Laya and I continue raising him the way we have been. And that puts me at ease.
