Sibling Rivalry and Airing Out Your Dirty Undies

I am about to embark on a new chapter in my life with having a second child and started to think and mainly pray that my kids would be able to get along. I have heard horror stories on how sisters and brothers are always at each others throats and to be honest with you those horror stories never hit that far from home when it came to me and my brother. Some of the things me and him pulled on one another were crazy and I knew it drove my mom crazy. Bless my mom's heart, she always tried her best to make us get along, but no matter what she said or did, my brother and I just nit and picked until the cows came home, or at least until bed time. However, one day she decided she had enough and that day changed how me and my brother learned to get along. Well, I say get along but blackmail helped big time in the situation and mom seized on that opportunity.

Since there were 8 years difference in my brother's age and mine, during the Summer time when I was 8 years old he was my babysitter. Every day my brother would have friends over and they would play video games, watch TV, or listen to music and there was his little sisters always butting in the way wanting to be apart of what they were doing. I have to admit that I wasn't always wanting to be around him because I thought it was cool to hang out with the older kids, or because I was bored, but to be honest his friends were extremely HOT and yea I had big time crushes on all his friends. He would get tired of me being around so he would either lock me in my room, tell embarrassing stories about me or anything he could do to get me out of his hair. I was tired of him always having one up on me so one day when he was taking a nap on the living room sofa in his boxer shorts because it was still early in the morning, I grabbed a large cup of ice cold water and splashed it on him. Furious as can be he got up and started to chase me screaming that once he got a hold of me he was going to kick my butt. I decided to run outside thinking since he wasn't dressed he wouldn't follow me out, however I was wrong. I think since he was so mad at what I just did that he didn't even realize all he had on was underwear and bolted out the door behind me. Luckily I made it back to the side door before he did and ran inside. I slammed the door behind me and locked him out! Seconds later he was beating on the door screaming "AMY, let me in the house right now or you are going to hurt so bad" and he kept saying things like that, however now that he couldn't get in I felt pretty safe. I thought after a few minutes he would calm down but it was getting worse and then friends of his drove by our house (girls included in the car) and saw my brother standing outside beating on the door with only his boxer's on. Want to know how to make a teenager embarrassed in front of friends should of been the title for that day because once he realized who was honking the horn and calling out sweet cheeks his face went through all the shades of red. He realized I wasn't going to let him back in the house and so he hid under the picnic table outside our side door. Word must of gotten around pretty fast because more and more friends started to drive by. My brother was extremely mad at me and I was getting pretty worried so I called my mom at work. She told me that she had enough of how we acted and she hung up on me but not before she told me to deal with it the way I saw fit. OK, eight year old mind starts to work and I came up with blackmail.

I ran up to my room and grabbed my camera. Headed back down stair to the door and still there was my brother sitting under the picnic table in all his glory and snapped a couple good shots for future use. Yes, this made him even worse however I thought to myself that if he were to ever bother me again with anything that I could get this picture out and have all his friends remember that day.

I still needed to let my brother back into the house because I knew I couldn't let him stay outside all day. So I told him I was going to unlock the door. Being that he was still under the table I knew if I unlocked the door it would give me a good minute advantage to run back to my room and lock the door so he couldn't catch me. I was right. As soon as I unlocked the knob I bolted for my room, locked my door and put a chair under the knob so he couldn't get in. I could hear him run up the stairs as I was doing this and he tried for the longest time to get in but finally gave up when one of his friends came over.

As a smart little girl I wasn't about to come out of my room that day so I pretty much stayed in there until my mother got home from work. She came into my room and talked to me about what happened. She said she wasn't going to punish me or my brother for things anymore and she was done with the bickering between us, however she snatched my camera and used it for her own black mail.

She told me and my brother that night at dinner that if she ever had to deal with my brother acting ugly to me that she would show all his friends this picture over and over. She told me that if I ever pulled stunts like that again on my brother she would allow him to kick the crap out of me with no punishment. Needless to say my brother didn't want that picture being shown anywhere else so he started to put up with me and I never wanted a fat lip from him so I backed off with bothering him as much.

We still had our bouts of yelling matches but as we got older they got lesser and we started to relate better on adult levels. However we will always have some great stories, like this one, to remind us that we weren't always head over heals about one another.