Seven(ish) years ago I sat in my physician’s office under blinding fluorescent lights, eight months pregnant with my second baby. The standard white paper crinkling beneath my shaking body was stifled by my heavy sobs. “What am I doing to my Jack? He’s had our undivided attention for two years. He’s the light of our life. I can’t possibly love another child as much as I love him. What did I do? Why was this a good idea?” and on and on. And on. Pregnant hormones may have played a role in this scenario. My obstetrician oh-so-benevolently and deftly replied, “This baby is a gift for Jack.”
And he could not have been more spot on.
I have since witnessed six (ahem, not-so-continuous) years of solid brother connection between Jack and Charlie: playing, singing, tickling, plotting, exploring, whispering under covers into the wee hours of the night. If one is gone, you see the melancholic Charlie Brown piano notes floating above the sulky body of the one left at home. This is later followed by deliberate pacing near windows and doors, and like a pup spotting a raccoon outside your window at 3 a.m., no one is getting anything done until [that bike is back, the bus rolls up, a car drops off] the brother is home. Of course, while the reunion is initially met with joyful squeals and incessant chatter, the moment soon opens the well-oiled Door Of Conflict and in they tumble with their voices so purposeful that their words feel tangible–hanging, midair, in an all-caps font. So it goes. With a bit of space and time, they forgive their annoyances and are soon discovered wearing costumes while building friendship forts with blueprints for a moat and a dragon; fire and water are popular emollients here.
My youngest is now forming similar attachments with his two older brothers, and it’s all written in their play. While Jack used appropriate-for-3-year-old toys when he was three, Ben has an affinity for Lego Ninjago and understands more Pokemon lingo than I do. He just has to be near them. When they are at school, he reverts to puzzles, firetrucks, and all things preschool, and in doing so I notice his play is richly layered with dialogue and actions that are a direct result of hours of side-by-side modeling. Of course, at roughly eleventy billion squabbles a week among them all, there is a boatload of modeling that zaps the innocence right out of his curious little eyes. I don’t romanticize their relationship. With three distinct and intense personalities, I see the anger, frustration, and resentment, but it’s also interlaced with palpable intimacy, tenderness, and protectiveness.
While I spend an inordinate amount of time mediating the conflict that seems second nature to them, I am also determined to notice the undeniable bond they share, and it’s not usually ever displayed by holding hands into the sunset. I find their connection on charming inventive spelling notes to each other stuffed under pillows, I hear it in their infectious guffawing over senseless jokes, I see it in a tangle of lanky limbs and laughter rolling on a carpet of grass, and it’s illustrated in their genuine sympathy to (accidental only) injury. It’s rarely TV-family-esque, but it’s them and it’s beautiful.
This piece was exclusively written for Light Inspired, an online photography forum.
Beautifully Ordinary is a trademark of Jen Lucas Photography, LLC.
