Sibling rivalry and a mother's love
Emily Brodrick
When I was a little kid in the early 90s on the South Fork of Long Island, my mom, Lisa, would bathe my older brother, my younger brother, and me all together. At 40, my mom had three children under seven years old, and since my dad wasn’t much into the whole kid-rearing thing, she had to wash us on her own. One bath with three kids was allegedly less work than three baths with one kid at a time.
When I was about four and he was about seven, my older brother, Geoffrey, told me during one of these cramped-up, scrub-downs that if I put my head under the water, my brain would melt and come out through my ears. My mom wasn’t in the room when he told me, so she could neither confirm nor deny the statement, but initially, I remember not believing him. We had a pool and I knew I had swum in it with my head below the surface.
“Why doesn’t my brain come out in the pool?” I inquired.
“It will only melt out in warm water,” he said.
Then I was afraid. I looked around at the warm water I was submerged in up to my chest. I couldn’t recall a time when my head had been underwater during a bath. When our mom washed our hair, she always used this plastic cup with a face on it–a remnant of a long-dismantled toy–to rinse the soap and conditioner out. She filled the cup with water from the faucet and poured it over our heads, letting the diluted products glide down over our faces, our shoulders, our chests. Maybe I had never dunked my head in the bathtub before. Maybe Geoffrey was right.
Geoffrey had a knack for getting under my skin, and he usually got away with it. Once, when he and I were riding the bus home from elementary school, we got into an argument about toys, and by the end of it, I had burst into tears. He had said, “Barbies are retarded because they’re for girls.” What stung about those kinds of remarks was that part of me believed them. Our parents’ dynamic was shaping our worldview: Moms took care of kids and dads did whatever they felt like. Tears were still rolling down my face when the bus dropped us off at the end of our driveway. Unusually, my dad was waiting there to walk us inside. When he saw my face, he asked, “What’s wrong, Boo?” He often called me by my baby name.
“GEOFFREY SUCKS!” I yelled. Since he wasn’t around much, I recall this being the first time I was honest with my dad about how much Geoffrey could hurt me.
“You shouldn’t say that about your brother.”
On another occasion at our elementary school, when Geoffrey was nine and I was six, his class was asked to make a timeline of their lives. His timeline was created in red and blue markers. Good experiences were written in red, his favorite color. Bad experiences were written in blue, his least favorite color. "May 15, 1992. Emily was born." was written in blue. I remember the teachers thinking it was funny.
What fueled this constant bickering between Geoffrey and I was that our relationship was one ruled by comparisons. He was tall (90th percentile according to our pediatrician) and I was short (42nd percentile). His hair was straight and mine was curly. He looked like our mom and I looked like our dad. He was three years older and I was three years younger. He was a boy and I was a girl. These differences felt not only irreconcilable but seemed to influence our mom’s relationships with us individually. My mom adored her gigantic, firstborn son who had her face. She introduced Geoffrey to the books that she loved—The Lord of the Rings, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and books about the World Wars. I was the opposite of all of that Geoffrey was and my mom seemed less invested in me. I got the “girly” books like the Confessions of Georgia Nicolson series by Louise Rennison, which was about a 14-year-old girl who couldn’t decide which boy she was most obsessed with. And because Geoffrey was older than me, and so much taller (a foot by our preteen years) he was allowed to sit in the passenger seat of my mom’s car long before I could. He and my mom would have long, adult conversations about history, science fiction, and politics. I just had to sit quietly in the back seat–small, ignorant child that I was–and listen.
Despite the favoritism though, my mom encouraged both Geoffrey’s and my creative sides equally. I loved to paint and draw pictures of plants, animals, fairies, and characters from my favorite TV shows like Hey Arnold! and the Power Puff Girls. Geoffrey loved building robots and cars and buildings from his favorite video games with cardboard and hot glue. None of what we needed to make our separate styles was ever in short supply. My mom, who has long, witchy, silver hair and wears a tie-dye shirt most days, bought me all kinds of markers, colored pencils, paints, and papers of different textures, colors, and sizes. For Geoffrey, she saved every piece of cardboard she got—mostly from mailed packages and paper towel tubes. Art was my escape from the complicated realities of our home. When my parents fought or when Geoffrey picked on me, after things had cooled off, I would go to my room and make colorful pictures of places where everyone smiled, even the cats and butterflies, and the sun wore sunglasses. This ability to pull myself out of a bad situation and into creating art has come in handy time and time again throughout my life. My mom helped me harness that power.
After several weeks of covering my ears with my hands when my mom poured the plastic container of water over my head, she finally asked, “Why do you keep doing that?”
I looked over at Geoffrey in the bath with me. I worried about what he would do to me if I told our mom the truth. But the weeks of living in fear had caught up with me and I was at breaking point.
“Geoffrey said if I put my head underwater, my brain would melt out through my ears,” I told her.
“Whaaat?” She said, drawing out the A’s in a way she still does when someone says something unbelievably stupid to her.
I don’t remember her saying what Geoffrey had told me wasn’t true. I just remember the relief of finally submerging completely into the bath and knowing I was safe.
I’m now 32 and Geoffrey is 35. Our relationship still isn’t good and probably never will be. My mom and I have reached a good place though. She still supports my art adventures. She always compliments my sense of color when I show her a new piece. We now have long adult conversations about history, science fiction, and politics, as well as plants, and animals, and food, and books. I live in Brooklyn and she still lives in the house I grew up in on the South Fork. We often meet up halfway–in Port Jefferson–for lunch. I take the Long Island Rail Road and she drives her car. Sometimes I get into the passenger seat when she picks me up from the train station. Sometimes she moves to the passenger seat and I drive her.
Once, in the bath, Geoffrey and I had been left alone momentarily. Our mom was dressing our little brother in another room. Geoffrey hadn’t forgotten that I had tatled on him about the brain-melting lie. He splashed me with a ton of water–what felt like an ocean-wave amount of water–and I ended up swallowing a big gulp of it. By the time my mom had come back, I was feeling nauseated. I knew I was going to puke. I aimed at Geoffrey. The puke was yellow and gooey. I remember thinking it looked like liquid soap. Geoffrey lept out of the bath and screamed as he ran out of the room. My mom chased after him. I stayed there, feeling victorious. I laid down, letting my body take up as much space in the bath as possible, and submerged my head underwater.