Kindred

When I was in my first year of high school, the movie Carrie opened and my parents forbid my teen brother and me from seeing it. This was pretty rare for our parents; they were laissez faire about most things and did not have a lot of rules, and we had seen The Omen and The Exorcist previously anyway. But after seeing Carrie in the theater, Mom and Dad believed that a scene in which Carrie is taunted by other girls when she starts to menstruate in gym class could raise subtle psychological issues in us that we somehow wouldn’t know how to handle or voice. At the time, I thought their reasoning was a little silly, but I really didn’t have any interest in the movie to begin with, and I didn’t care much either way about their fatwa.

My brother Jonathan, on the other hand, ran with a cool gang of kids who often went to popular teen movies and other such events, and he bitterly resented Mom and Dad’s interference and the possibility that he might have to forego a Carrie outing. The issue was litigated several times in our house by him.

Fast forward about eighteen months. Jon and I were now about 16 and 17, and Carrie came on broadcast television for perhaps the first time or second time. As I was flipping channels, I caught a few minutes of it. My (soon-to-be-lawyer) brother observed this, and immediately summoned my parents to the living room for full oral argument on an emergency stay of my activities.

In the most strident terms, my brother asserted that my Carrie television-watching was prima facie evidence of household disaparate treatment and failure to consistently apply rules and regulations, leading to the inexorable conclusion that I, the younger sister, was the clear beneficiary of parental favoritism. As relief, he demanded that I immediately be barred from watching Carrie just as he had been barred. My parents hemmed and hawed. As I was now 16, they felt that their duty to protect me from the ‘disturbing’ menstruation taunting scene was really negligible at this point. And moreover, the TV movie was way past that scene anyway chronologically. (Apparently no one cared about the gory prom slaughter or buckets of blood dropping on Carrie). But my father, laughing, agreed to forbid me to watch the show. And I obediently found something else on instead, probably Knots Landing or some other 1980’s nonsense.

This family episode, which always makes me laugh when I think about it, sometimes makes me wonder and reflect on whether Max and I were right to deny Sarah the joys of the petty resentments, competitiveness, jealousies, and sometimes body blows that go with having a sibling. She wanted a sibling early on; it was one of the things she expressed to us when she got her first communication device, her Vantage Vanguard, at age 3. We asked her what she wanted most, and she said “Baby Brother.”

It would have been nice to produce a baby brother for Sarah. I fantasized a sweet, supportive kid named Sam or Theo who could have been a best friend/protector type and helped break the social ice in the neighborhood, at the pool, and really everywhere we went. However, I also remember a few days after Sarah was born, when we first got home from the hospital and Max was probably still running on adrenaline, he said to me “We should definitely have another baby.” I just stared at him like he was high on crack. My body felt completely outprocessed, like every cell had been taken to produce Sarah. I was supposed to do that again?? And this is before we knew she had special needs. After we knew that we were chasing a genetic diagnosis, we felt too unsure of ourselves to try again. And frankly, my fantasies of a little boy to support and defend Sarah felt too selfish. Not enough of his own activities, his own development, his own personality.

So Sarah did not have the fun (or pain) of sibling rivalry. We used to say “Once you’ve had the best, why bother with the rest?” about her only child status. She was everything.