The Two-Child Dilemma

I remember being at Anson's house when I was a child, and his dad coming home from a business trip of some kind, and presenting his two children with identical gifts (for some reason, in my no doubt flawed memory, these gifts are identical Animal House t-shirts and identical yellow Sony Walkmans). I thought it was kind of weird at the time. (Which I shouldn't have, given that Mom had purchased for my two older brothers and myself identical leather Fonzie jackets from Charney's not too many years before, which purchases were probably good at mitigating sibling rivalry, but which caused untold trouble when we went to a new school [George Washington Elementary] after moving to Syracuse. Walking into school as a trio of Happy Days greasers, we were derided as Baldwinsville gang members, among other things. I fought somebody on the very first day of school on account of that jacket. I'll always remember it, because the playground was covered in gravel -- and not little pea gravel, but big honkin', flinty pieces of gravel; the kind one could reasonably fashion into arrowheads, or knifepoints -- and that gravel was integral to the hurt I lay on the kid I was beating up for making fun of the Fonzie jacket my Mom had bought to avoid us brothers fighting.)

Which brings us to the hair-bow struggle.

We were getting ready to go to a dinner party, and I made the amateur mistake of offering a ribbon I'd found in the basement to Suzanne as an incentive to encourage her to get her hair done by Mom. She loved the idea. The problem was, Elizabeth loved the idea, too.

So I went looking for another ribbon. Thankfully, I found a beautiful red ribbon that coordinated with Elizabeth's unseasonable Christmas dress. Unfortunately, we cut her hair short the month before. Where Suzanne could flaunt a close-to-the-nape pony tail that looked like something out of an illustrated fantasy novel about unicorns, Elizabeth could muster only a stubby tail, like one of Jay Gatsby's docked polo ponies. To say that she was unhappy with this would be an understatement. There was an explosion of grief.

Suzanne's beautiful ponytail.

She's pretty happy with her 'do.

Elizabeth's short, high, and reportedly uncomfortable ponytail. Note the grimace in the mirror.

Elizabeth hated hated hated the high ponytail Barb was forced to tie.

Parents are constantly balancing their need for peace and quiet, versus their perceived need not to spoil their child, versus the child's need for whatever it thinks of in that millisecond as being fair and right. If there's a winning formula, somebody please publish it and make a million bucks. I'll buy the book.

As we move forward in this relatively new world of parenting two kids (remember, Suzanne hasn't turned three yet), I struggle all the time with this discrepancy problem. For instance, Elizabeth has a treasure box that we bought for five cents at a yard sale. But now Suzanne has grown up with the understanding that kids have treasure boxes. But she doesn't have a treasure box. So she piles her treasures (mostly filthy bird feathers and fir cones) on our bookshelf. Recently, we bought a brand new treasure box for her. It cost $23.00.