Having multiple members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha in the household, I’ve learned that toddler fights are nothing compared to teen wars. These people in high school and just beyond, engage in cellular warfare designed to leave lasting emotional scars.
“Hey P, just finished practicing parking. Sorry I scratched your car.” It doesn’t matter how many times he’s checked, he can’t shrug it off. He has to go look and she opens the window from her bedroom so he can hear her cackle.
Not to think he’s defenseless mind you. “Hey A. I helped Mom follow you on Instagram.” He’s created a few phantom emails that sound like they could be me. Likewise, he peeks and other siblings rat on her purging her rolls.
The problem with teens is, there are no off hours, no truces, and no guarantee that one of them isn’t plotting. We’ve weathered the frozen water bottles, the Alexa set to play Christmas carols at two am, and the hiding of the cell phones in the parents room. (We liked that last one). The changing of the WiFi access as a form of blackmail to get dishes done would have worked better if younger siblings weren’t equally adroit at guessing their older family member’s passwords.
Guacamole filled grapes and a touch of tabasco in the ice cubes stand out as two of the more creative attempts at sibling sabotage. They haven’t short sheeted any beds, but that may be because most of them don’t make them to begin with. Anything requiring actual labor that could be mistaken for dutifulness has yet to materialize.
All sibling rivalries have moments where the fight turns from ordinary to something akin to sacred tradition. For them, August 20th, 2018 stands out for what was done, and what was created. The older brother sought to teach the younger tweens a lesson, and gave an old Pinky-pie My Little Pony a mohawk. For the first two months, no one admitted to who done it, but the pony traveled, making appearances in school lockers, backpacks, and lunch bags –stalking two of the younger teens. It even camped out in the freezer where one of them liked to get ice water in the evening.
They tried throwing it out, but somehow it returned, sitting at the bottom of the aquarium –and just to freak them out, he’d fashioned a chain of paperclips around Pinkie’s hooves to make it look, like Pinky slept with the fishes not of her own free will. It became a thing, to place Pinky somewhere, (without causing damage) that would signify retaliation, and so poor Pinky found herself in a vise in the garage. Next, we discovered her surrounded by knives that required hand washing, and that had been used to peel and cut up beets. She lurked in a pasta pot of boiling water, held down by two metal spoons. Pinky also ventured next to the tire of her brother’s car, awaiting squashblivion, and had a burial plot in the garden complete with a cross and makeshift tombstone.
She now enjoys a near iconic status –awarded to the child who the other siblings acknowledge has won the week. However, as a not entirely neutral and somewhat fatigued witness to these battles, I worry one day, they will cross a line. My own imaginations recognized that eventually, if they aged without maturing, she’d wake up and find Pinky’s head in the bed next to her, or he’d finish his shower and find Pinky sitting in a rocking chair upstairs in his room with the psycho soundtrack playing from a carefully hidden echo dot.
So I did the only thing I could do to ensure Pinky lost her “it” factor with all interested parties. I wrote about her on my blog and posted it to Facebook. Pinky now enjoys a quiet retirement, gathering dust in the memory boxes in the basement. Now I just have to worry about whether they’ve substituted wasabi for the guacamole, and whether or not the latest new driver in the family is telling the truth when he comes in and says, “Hey, I accidentally bumped your car.”
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