My 13 and 9 Year Old Fight Constantly – I’m Starting to Wonder If This Is Just Normal Rivalry
I’m sitting here at 8:17 pm listening to yelling from the bedroom down the hall, and 10 minutes ago I just mopped soda off the hallway carpet. This round started because 9-year-old Milo grabbed 13-year-old Jax’s favorite gray hoodie out of the clean laundry basket to wear to the bus stop this morning, didn’t tell him, and spilled blue Gatorade on the cuff on the way home. Jax called him a “meddling little pest” and Milo threw a stuffed football at Jax’s new vinyl copy of that Kendrick Lamar album he saved three months of allowance to buy. Miraculously, it didn’t scratch, but that’s about the only win we’ve had all day.
When they were little, sibling rivalry was easy to spot and easy to fix. Jax would push Milo off his tricycle, Milo would bite Jax’s arm over a matchbox car. I’d break it up, hand out stickers for calm-down time, remind them to share, done. Now it’s weird, quiet, the kind of stuff that makes me wonder if I’m raising two little jerks some days, or if this is just what it’s supposed to look like when boys get older. Jax doesn’t yell half the time anymore, he just does small, intentional things to get back. Last week he hid Milo’s half-built Minecraft Creeper Lego set behind the water heater in the garage. Didn’t admit it for three days, just shrugged and said “maybe he lost it” when Milo cried at dinner. I only found it when I went looking for an extra extension cord for the Christmas lights. What kind of 13 year old does that, right? But then when I yelled at Jax for it, he mumbled that Milo kept coming into his room when he was trying to finish his math homework and wouldn’t leave, even after he asked three times. And I couldn’t really argue with that, even though I still made him apologize.
It’s like they’re on completely opposite wavelengths right now, and the friction just keeps happening. Jax is at that age where any time with his little brother feels like an intrusion, I think. He wants his privacy, he wants to hang out with his friends without a 9 year old trailing after them asking to join the game. I get that. But Milo is at that age where Jax is still the coolest guy he knows, and he just wants to be included. Even bad attention is better than no attention, right? I caught him rearranging Jax’s vinyl collection by color last week, just to mess with him, and when I asked why he did it he said “he never talks to me unless I mess something up.” That hurt my heart, but it also made sense.
Last month Jax had a friend over to spend the night, and Milo kept hovering by the living room, trying to join their Call of Duty match. Jax didn’t yell, he just unplugged his Xbox, carried it into the bathroom, and closed the door, sat on the closed toilet to play. I banged on the door and told him that was ridiculous, he couldn’t do that to his brother. He opened the door an inch and whispered, “I haven’t hung out with Sam alone in two months. Can’t I just have one night?” I walked away. I still think it was a jerk move, but I got it.
I called my sister that night, complaining, because she’s three years older than me, same gap as my boys. She laughed and reminded me that when she was 13 and I was 9, I dumped a whole bottle of blue hair dye into her shampoo because she wouldn’t let me come to the mall with her and her friends. And she hid my entire Babysitter’s Club book collection in the back of my dad’s tool shed for a month. We didn’t speak to each other for an entire spring break. Now we text every day, and she’s the first person I call when I’m losing my mind over the boys. That made me pause. We don’t remember all the fights, do we? We just remember that we’re siblings now.
I still worry, sometimes. I see all those parent reels on Instagram where the big brother reads to the little brother every night, and they build forts together on the weekend, and I think what’s wrong with mine. But then I think about two weeks ago, when Jax had his first basketball game of the season, and the coach benched him the entire second half. He got in the car and wouldn’t say a word, just stared out the window, wouldn’t answer me or my husband when we asked what was wrong. Milo, who’d been complaining the whole game that he was bored and wanted to go get ice cream, dug around in his backpack and pulled out the sour patch kids he’d saved from his school lunch, the ones Jax loves, and just handed them to him. Didn’t say anything. Jax didn’t say thank you or anything, but he let Milo slide into the middle seat next to him instead of making him go back to the back, which he always does because he says Milo fidgets too much and gets his stuff dirty.
I used to run in to break up every single fight. I used to think my job was to make them get along, to teach them to be best friends right now. Tonight I’m still sitting here on the couch, and the yelling just died down a little. Jax is blasting music from his room, and Milo is here next to me watching cartoon reruns, pouting because I made him apologize for spilling the Gatorade. I haven’t gone up to force Jax to forgive him yet.
I think maybe this is just normal. It’s not pretty. It’s chewed AirPods (Milo got ahold of Jax’s last month, chewed the earbud like a dog toy), hidden Lego, Gatorade on hoodies, mean names you don’t really mean. It’s two boys figuring out how to be themselves, and how to be brothers, at the same time. Some days I think it’ll never get better, that they’ll be grown and still stealing each other’s stuff and not talking. Some days I see that little sour patch kid moment, and I think it’s all just turning out okay, even when it doesn’t look like it. I still don’t have the answer. I just know we’re all still here, figuring it out one fight at a time. (Word count: 1182)
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