Sibling love: On the Brother and Sister Connection

Wally and Vivvi were arguing about which show to watch. She wanted “Jake the Pirate.” He wanted “Sofia the First.” He convinced her to his side by offering to give her an old dust buster he found laying around. They sat happily on the couch together, her holding the broken appliance, both totally engaged in the tales of the girl-next-door turned princess. (Husband Wally insists that this was a grand scheme concocted by Vivvi, who got everything she truly wanted out of the end result.)

These two. I am constantly amazed by their strangeness. They are strange individually, but together they are an exotic creature.

People often ask me if they get along. “Yes!” I say. They are best friends, and best enemies. They love each other, and they push each other’s buttons so viciously. They are five minutes on, five minutes off.

I only have to rewind through the past few hours of any given day to demonstrate how much that is true. This morning he “babysat” her in her room while I took a shower. They were getting along so well that I putzed around in my room even after I was ready so I wouldn’t have to interrupt. On our errand, they ranged from running around displays in the store to Vivvi tackling Wally and bashing his head onto the hard dressing room floor and his angry-faced whack at her in return, then back to running around laughing again. When we got home, he locked himself in his room saying he didn’t want to play with her, and she was crying at his door. I offered to get Vivvi’s Brave mini-figures down so she could play in her room, and he came out to ask if he could join her. They went back to playing nicely.

We knew Wally without Vivvi, but he became a complete person when she made him a big brother. It was a role he was born to play—ordering her around, taking care of her, laughing at her. He loved her so much as a baby that I swear she is why he still loves babies. He swoons over them, baby talks them, lets them grab his face. “Mothers” is a verb, but I think Wally has made “Brothers” into one—he brothers every baby he meets. And we never knew Vivvi without Wally—I realized this when she was 18 months old and I took her to her first library class while he was at preschool. We sat, and she looked around the room, and I could tell she was thinking, “Where is Wally? Where are all the big kids? Why are we here?” As she squirmed in my lap throughout the class, I felt like I was meeting her for the first time. But the years have shown, she was designed to be his complement. Where he is intense, she is easygoing. Where he is logical, she is silly. Where he loves order, she loves to wander. And she loves her “Wa-we”.

What makes them strange, though, is their secret connection. The picture at the top of this post is how they like to watch shows or movies, leaning in together with miles of couch around them. Every day, they play games that only they understand. Once, they were playing while I vacuumed. They were both happy when I checked on them when I was done. Me: “What’s this game?” WV: “I’m holding Vivvi, and then I drop her, and then I sit on her head.” They both looked at me, laughed, and continued their game.

And in the car, they ignore each other, they fight, they read books. But the best is when I am not paying attention, and I hear them laughing. I try to catch up on what’s so funny, and it’s usually one of them making sounds that crack the other up. The cracking up cracks the sound maker up, and on and on. Or they have invented some game—in a recent favorite, they both say “Ooooooh” at a high pitch, then slide to a low pitch together, then slide to a high pitch, and for some reason they find the whole process funny. (They are not actually funny—nothing they are doing or saying is funny, but even on my worst days their joy cracks right through my adult seriousness and hardness and logic and I am laughing and laughing and wondering what about life was I finding so hard?)

The other day, we were driving, and out of the blue, I heard Wally say to Vivvi, “I am going to marry you, okay? When we grow up.” “Okay,” she said. I tried to piece together where that came from. I didn’t have to think back far. They had been getting along that day, so five minutes before that, I had turned down the radio and said, “You guys are so lucky. Because you live with your best friend.”

Maybe they are not so exotic. Maybe they are just close-in-age siblings. Suddenly, I’m reminded of lichen. I read once about lichen. (I specifically remember it because the title of the article said, “I’m Lichen It.” Bah ha ha!) Lichen was used as an example for a symbiotic relationship—a relationship in nature where two totally separate things depend on and benefit from each other. Lichen is an organism created when algae and fungus (two separate organisms) live and grow together. You’ve seen lichen. Just look closely at a tree’s bark in the Spring, or at a rock in a park, and you will probably see a mossy green growth—that’s lichen. In the relationship, the algae makes food for the fungus by photosynthesis, and the fungus gathers moisture and provides protection from the environment. They feed, they anchor, they protect—they grow together. They are separate, but they are so much a part of each other that they are given a composite organism name.

And now, Vivvi and Wally make sense. This strange sibling thing they have going on. They complete each other, fill one another out. They are music—she is treble (with her bubbly voice, she would have to be), and he is bass. There is dissonance, there is harmony. They are my favorite song. Whatever it is, I’m lichen it. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist!)