PRIVATE BABY
My mom and dad had three daughters in a row, then had a surprise fourth baby they called “Product Failure” behind closed doors. I was the oldest, and Drew was born when I was nine and a half. We only had girl cousins on both sides, so the addition of a boy to such an estrogen-laden family felt like an honest-to-God miracle. My sisters and I were charmed out of our minds from the first second he took a breath.
Because he was an oopsie-daisy, Mom had given all her baby stuff away by the time he arrived. So Betty Blanchard, head of the church nursery, snuck us a round metal crib from the children’s ministry, and Mom put it in the corner of my bedroom. All of a sudden, during fourth grade, I had a new roommate. Every night after Mom spent the minimally necessary five minutes to put Drew to bed (because by the fourth baby, Mama ain’t going through a forty-five-minute process to get a kid to sleep—girl, bye), I’d pull him out of his crib and put him in bed with me. This was entirely unsafe—no guardrails, no pillow blockade, no concern about “tummy sleeping”—but I’d tuck him in tight next to me and curl around him and marvel at how much I loved my own private baby.
That poor boy grew up exactly like you’d imagine with three older sisters. When he was around seven, my mom asked him, “Has it been really bad being the only boy in a family of sisters?” and Drew deadpanned, “Oh, Mom. If only you knew.” He had no immunity against us: we dressed him up with barrettes and makeup and paraded him around with painted nails at our command. Ladies and gentlemen, he had a favorite purse. Because he was the fourth kid and it was the eighties, Mom never really knew where he was (at some point, one becomes fatigued with parenting), so we jointly raised him, not unlike a pack of wolves.
Don’t you dare feel sorry for him: he found a way to benefit from older sisters. He would “randomly” show up when we had sleepovers and pool parties, and our friends kissed and fawned over him his entire childhood. Drew had a knack for charm and exercised it shamelessly if it meant he could cozy up to my girlfriends during a movie. Joke was on him, because small-town life meant three of my best friends became his middle school health, geometry, and science teachers with memories of Drew leaning innocently against them like he had no idea those were teenage breasts under his cheek. Yes, ma’am, Ni . . . uh, Mrs. McMullen, and please try to forget how I took pictures of you in the pool through my bedroom window five years ago.
Let me assure any reader with a bunch of girls and one boy, especially if he is the baby—that kid will be overloved his whole life. He will have extra mothers who continue to coddle him long after it is remotely appropriate. Furthermore, they will compete for his attention as if he is the dreamy star of a Disney movie. Once, after a family gathering, my sister Lindsay called me, sincerely furious at our other sister: “I get so mad when we are all together, because Cortney hogs Drew the entire time!” Just LOL, you guys.
Brandon has forever eye-rolled me and my sisters for over-attending to Drew who is, by the letter of the law, a grown man, although he was seven years old when Brandon first walked in our door. Much like our guy friends and boyfriends always took Drew under their wings like stand-in brothers, Brandon became a true brother, as did Cortney’s husband, Zac. When Drew was still in elementary school, he and Brandon would slap each other’s inner wrists with two fingers, and the first one to quit lost. My sisters and I objected in horror as Drew refused to give in while tears rolled down his face. This was boy behavior we never understood, not unlike Brandon driving his car parallel to us on the highway while Drew hung his naked butt out of the window, then pulling in front of us and lobbing strawberries from their Sonic Dr. Peppers at our windshield. Never mind that one was a married adult in his twenties and the other was in middle school: they both only had sisters and were making up for lost time.
You might think two parents would object to these shenanigans, but you would be wrong. Drew had an entirely different mom and dad than I did. I had parents who enforced an 11:30 p.m. curfew until I went to college. Drew had parents who vaguely remembered him coming in at 2:30 a.m. as a high school sophomore, but they can’t really recall because of all the sleep they were prioritizing. Mom and Dad disciplined me with spanking spoons, five hundred sentences (“It is always best to tell the truth . . .”), groundings, and revoked privileges, but when I mocked Drew’s spring-break-teen lifestyle, Mom told me, “Groundings were difficult because it punished us.” Oh my gosh. I cannot. This is the same mother who capitulated to her twelve-year-old son to let him drive. She protests this charge by noting that “it was only the last five miles home from church.”
During our teen and college years, Lindsay and I formed the top group of siblings, and Cortney and Drew comprised the bottom team. That was the season when a six-and ten-year age gap was the most pronounced. Drew was an eighth grader the year I delivered my first son. I largely missed Drew and Cortney’s teens while traversing young adulthood. Because I was so square and by-the-book and my siblings were so, um, not that, we weren’t sure how to connect across personalities and life stages for a while. Lindsay was my bridge to Cortney, and Cortney was her bridge to Drew, but without them, we weren’t sure how to get to each other. I continued to loosen up while they started tightening up, getting us much closer to shared middle territory, but it took a few years to give each other permission to be different grown-ups than our childhood roles dictated.
Now, in our thirties and forties, we’ve developed a whole new adult group including all four of us. We easily and seamlessly spend time in pairs, threes, or all together, which is so overwhelming and encompassing, it is a miracle our spouses have remained wed to us. We are quite a fortress. Our family vernacular is so concrete, Brandon can finish all our stories and predict every quote we’ll repeat for the ten-thousandth time, bless him lo these twenty-three years of marriage to a King kid.
Observing the arc of our sibling relationships gives me so much hope for my own kids. There are days in this household I am convinced my children will never speak again once they move out. The fighting, the personality clashes, the different ideologies—fix it, Jesus. My headstrong teenagers tell us how to parent their siblings because they are convinced everyone else is going to hell in a handbasket. I have two cowboy-boot-wearing, deer-hunting, conservative button pushers and a Virginia Woolf–reading, vegetarian, liberal feminist. I have a relentless, literal, extroverted Ethiopian and an insatiable, sarcastic, competitive athlete who used to be an only child.