There seems to be one rule about raising children I wish any of the books had mentioned.
As soon as you have more than one sibling who can talk, bickering will ensue.
Strictly speaking, even if you have only one child, there can still be bickering, as long as there is a close enough friend, or maybe cousin, for him or her to bicker with.
It seems an unavoidable law of nature.
Say, for example, that you have set up an easel in your kitchen.
Two easels, of course, because how could two little boys share one? But that was just the start.
“This is my red paint.”
“Let me hold it!”
“Yours is the one over there.”
“How do you know?”
“Because the lid is on crooked.”
“It is not! It’s on perfectly! Oops.”
“Mom, he spilled paint on the kitchen curtain!”
“I did not; you made me spill it.”
“I didn’t touch you!”
“It’s your fault, anyway!”
“How is it my fault if I didn’t touch you?”
“You looked at me and that’s why it spilled!”
“Okay, boys, let’s not argue over spilt paint, let’s just wash it out.”
“It’s my spot, Mommy, I should wash it out.”
“Well, this one next to it is my spot.”
“Where? I can’t see it!”
“It’s underneath your spot, so I can wash your spot, too.”
“Mom! He’s washing my spot!”
This illustrates what I call the First Law of Bicker Dynamics: “There is nothing too large, too small, or too ridiculous to be bickered about.”
“Mommy, he rolled his eyes at me.”
“I did not! I was just watching a fly.”
“Mommy, he ‘watched a fly’ at me!”
Henry Kissinger once said, about universities, that the politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small. What, I wonder, would he say about stakes that are completely invisible?
One night my two warriors were engaged in a form of combat they called Osage Bed Fighting.
Originally, it consisted of both boys standing on a bed and slugging each other with pillows until one of them fell off the bed.
Then one of them “invented” the “Zero-Particle Camera” (which was conveniently invisible to grownups). They started “filming” their slugfests, and critiquing the (similarly invisible) “playbacks,” instead of actually fighting.
“There! I hit you with the silver bullet! I won!”
“You didn’t hit me! It didn’t come near me! It was frozen in the middle of the frame!”
“Yes, but in the next frame, it hit you.”
“It did not, I ducked.”
“You can’t duck that fast! It’s only a millisecond!”
“I can too, I’m very quick.”
This brings us to the Second Law of Bicker Dynamics: “Bickering will increase with the invisibility of the issue being bickered about.”
“You cheated!”
“You cheated first!”
Once the “c” word is bandied about, the dynamic goes rapidly downhill. But I am, frankly, baffled about how to adjudicate a dispute whose every ingredient is invisible.
“I don’t care who cheated.”
“But he started it!”
“But he double-cheated!”
“I don’t care who did what; all I care is that it’s finished. There will be no more bickering in this house!”
“It isn’t bickering, it’s a disagreement!”
“It’s bickering if I say it’s bickering.”
“Now you’re the one bickering with us, mommy!”
“They had me, there.”
They had also just proven Bickering’s Third Law: “There is always more to bicker about.” Or, to put it scientifically, “Bickering will expand to fill all available space and time.”
But what you really have to watch out for is the Fourth Law of Bicker Dynamics: “Bickering will increase as the square of your inability to escape.”
As, for example, when you are trapped in a car going 60 miles per hour. Or worse yet, a car going zero, stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
“You said my right to wave my fist ended at his nose!”
“It’s just an expression. You’re not supposed to really do it.”
“Mommy, he just put his fist in my eye!”
“At least it wasn’t your nose!”
And so on, until you are ready to set your own hair on fire just to change the subject.
Alas, science has no more found a cure for Bickering than it has for Gravity.
I could suggest a modest proposal, researching both subjects at the same time. All it would take is a simple rocket, launched one way into space.
Invisibly, of course.
