Double Jeopardy

I could really use a clone right about now.

The problem du jour with the kids is sibling rivalry. It’s popping up here and there, whackamole style, for us parents to swiftly descend upon and bop into oblivion. As in, “Isaac took my toy!” Bop. Wailing cries from Isaac when Lucy yanks back said toy. Bop-bop.

But sometimes one particular strain of this competitive streaks tugs at my guilty heartstrings in a way that I wish I could really solve the problem rather than bopping it away. Sometimes I am the prize to be won and hoarded, because apparently there isn’t enough of me to go around.

This particular blue-eyed, blonde-haired, two-headed monster typically roars its terrible roars at bedtime, when Lucy is pretty insistent that I be the one to shepherd her through the rituals by using ironclad preschool rationales like “we are both girls, and only the girls in the house can brush their teeth right now. The boys are going to do something else.” So I’ll give in to her endless negotiations and swap kids with my husband, trading changing table duties with my 2-year-old son for PJs-potty-toothbrush-storytime with 4-year-old Lucy, only to have Ike start to wail and reach for me as I walk away from little man and toward his big sister.

I’m not exactly sure how this problem will work itself out. For the moment, I’m judiciously trying to alternate nights between taking the lead with one kid or the other, so it’s clear to the chief bean counter and her young apprentice that I’m not playing favorites; I’m also trying this tactic when it comes to who gets to sit near the running water in the tub during a bath and whose turn it is to pick the TV show.

Meanwhile my poor husband, a great dad in every way, is left feeling like second banana (or so I assume – we haven’t had an in-depth discussion about it beyond how to make the hollering kids pipe down in the nightly moment of their discontent). I predict that just when I’ve figured out some kind of solution, the kids will have moved on to greener pastures – Daddy – and I’ll be the one left to take up his sloppy seconds.

But for now, I’m left feeling like my lap is never big enough, that my repertoire of goodnight songs can’t satisfy a tough crowd, and that my attention is never lavished equally enough to be satisfying to everyone. It’s a feeling that is driving me a little out of my mind because I can’t imagine loving two people more, and yet they seem to be left wanting for more.