Sibling Rivalries Can Become Alliances

Picking up where I left off last week, I'll note that another adjustment to a growing family is the connubial conundrum of how to organize a household so it doesn’t turn into a dysfunctional one, with all the emotional fallout that creates for generations to come.
When a family of three children expands to a fourth, what’s to become of the middle child, who once was the odd man out but now is second of four? He loses the insurance of having that old standby, the middle child syndrome, to blame if he ends up a ne’er-do-well basket case panhandling on a street corner.
If the kids vote 2-2 on something, there’s no tiebreaker any more.
The secret is to make each kid occasionally feel like the only child. Melissa and Skip do that admirably, taking time as often as possible to spend individual time with each of their blokes.
Melissa often does it almost to a fault, such as insisting that she take each of the Terrific Trio on a date even as her date with the stork approached and she was under the weather.
Such attention makes the home an egalitarian epicenter of equality rather than a forbidding bode of favoritism.
And equality builds alliances. No longer considered a threat, the newbie can become an ally, which comes in really handy when the kids need to gang up on the parents to get their way. And then, well, and then, the parents have to learn a whole new set of tools to avoid that dysfunctional booby trap.
Beyond relationships and, perhaps last but certainly not least, the emotional havoc they can wreak in a familial power shuffle, there’s also the financial aspect.
Not the least of concerns is what to do about vehicles. And face it, two-seaters aren’t practical for families of six, space wise or mouth-feeding wise. And that was the case when Skip’s Corvette was squeezed out of the garage and into the classified ads.
He had had fun with that baby for a couple of years, until, well, like one of the neighbors said when the family was out trick-or-treating and infant Patrick was sleeping in his skeleton costume.
“He traded a Corvette in for a BABY!” the neighbor marveled.
That reminded me of the Beach Boys “Fun, Fun, Fun,” which the Carpenters also covered. I’ll defer to the Carpenters here, because the car in this video looks more like a Corvette than the T-Bird in the lyrics:



After Skip said sayonara to the Corvette, Jack told me nonchalantly, “Daddy cried when he sold the Corvette.”
I can understand shedding a tear, or even 96 tears, which brings up the 1965 song of Question Mark and the Mysterians:



Years from now, long after those tears have dried, when the family gathers for holiday meals — the REAL arbiters of whether they are normal or dysfunctional — they’ll still have pictures of that old Vette.