He is wanted for transgressions against humanity. His alleged crime spree includes such offenses as touching, being “weird,” “totally annoying” and, on occasion, “looking at me funny.” He is a master of disguise and even in the midst of an offense may appear sweet, sincere and wholly innocent. He is impervious to solitary confinement and his recidivism rate is high.

 He is a ten-year-old big brother.   

He lives, or so I am told, to make his little sister miserable. The victim further claims that I have “always liked him better.”  

When brought to trial his defense is both simple and swift. He makes counterattacks against his alleged victim. Apparently, he feels the same way about her. 

He further contends “I always side with her.” 

And me without my black and white referee’s jersey and whistle.  

Snap. If you felt the faintest quiver of a vibration not unlike a small earthquake recently, it was merely my last nerve snapping. This after two non-stop hours of “stop touching me!” “Mo-om he’s looking at me!” “STOP!!! Stop it! STOP ITTTTTT!”  

I can buy that sibling rivalry is “normal”, but to what extent before it constitutes a felony?  

I have had to point out to my eldest child on more than one occasion that one of the benchmarks for my success as a parent was assisting his survival to adulthood. My success in this endeavor was not looking promising as he had his little sister quite nearly over the edge.  

You can poke, prod, tease, torment and tickle-torture her but there is one thing you simply cannot, must not, do. 

You must not mess with her stuffed dog. His name is Chips and he is her favorite. She loves him madly and wants only the best for him. He sleeps with her at night, and spends his days either accompanying her to school or, on occasion, lounging around on the sofa awaiting her return. He is small, perhaps eight inches in length, and weighs just a tad more than air. He is light, compact, and one would think, easy to avoid. 

To our son, her big brother, he is, of course irresistible. The boy must mess with that stuffed dog every single solitary chance he gets. Chips, as you can imagine, makes a marvelous football.  

He is a good boy. Sweet, sensitive, caring. We get compliments on him all the time I swear. Why then, does he get this gleam – almost a glint really – in his eye and set his sights on tormenting his sister so often?  

Why does she, conversely, continue to rise to the bait? 

Therein lies the eternal question: Which came first? “She started it!” or “He touched my stuff!” 

Theory. One fateful day when all the yelling in the world wasn’t working, I theorized that the boy provokes her purely out of boredom and the enjoyable predictability of getting his sister’s goat. If attention is the goal, I reasoned, then what if his sibling simply refused to take the bait? Wouldn’t that basically disarm the situation? Good to know I hadn’t wasted that semester I spent sleeping through Child Psych 101 after all!  

Thus armed with my newly formed “better parenting through psycho-babble” mindset, I was fairly chomping at the bit for the sibling rivalry games to begin. Forget getting in touch with my inner child. I was going to talk some sense into my outer children. It seemed wise to start with the seven year old. They tend to be more gullible at that age.  

Predictably soon after, our golden girl came raving into the kitchen, temper flaring so hot she nearly had steam coming out of her ears. “He’s making that noise again and he knows I hate it!” “He keeps humming louder just to BUG ME!”  

I was so ready for this.   

“Well honey does that make you FEEL like he doesn’t respect your wishes? Do you FEEL like he needs to listen to what matters to you and take your feelings into consideration? Do you feel like you might want to sit down and discuss it when you’ve had time to calm down and not react in anger?” 

Eyes wide she gazed in amazement (at my obvious wisdom no doubt). She stood, completely disarmed and, quite frankly, distracted from her hatred of her brother just moments before (see how good I am? I should write a book!).  

Then she said the words that made me really feel me merit as a mother:  

“No, Mommy. That makes me FEEL like hurting him!”  

Hey, I tried. 

And, for the record, she started it.  

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There is a certain comfort to be taken in the knowledge that some things are probably never going to change.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence; the earth will continue to rotate around the sun, and I will not get even one iota smarter this summer over last.

Learned lesson. After three plus decades on this earth you would think that by now I would have learned just a little bit about sunscreen. You would be wrong. I have, however, recently learned quite a bit about aloe.

I sum it up thusly, on the first day God made the sun so the devil had no choice but to counter with sunburn.

For the record, I am much better at parenting then I am self-preservation.

Stupid mistake. Despite remembering to coat both children with a thick layer of sunblock, I still managed to believe it a fine idea to stand IN THE WATER under a blazing hot sun for more than four hours with nothing between me and the sun but my own stupidity. I know, just typing it I’m embarrassed all over again.

I honestly don’t know which hurt worse — the peeling or my pride.

What I really suffer from is a case of rampant optimism.

A little sun. Despite years of cause and effect training which would have trained even a gerbil to recognize “sun minus sunscreen = burn,” I continue to operate under the delusion that I, the whitest white girl in America — can get “just a little sun.” This is akin to believing you can get “just a little pregnant” or “just a little nuclear radiation exposure.”

I persist in this belief because in my teens I could — and did — tan.

Tanning goal. That was really my whole life goal back then. Study? Maybe. College? Yeah, whatever.

A nice golden copper toned glow — I’ll work on it day after day until I achieved my goal with only a backyard lawn chair, a couple hundred gallons of baby oil, and my ability to lie completely prostrate for hours at a time to guide me.

Brown baby. They also tell me I used to get “brown as a berry” as a baby. Apparently, I am supposed to take great solace in the fact that I was a real babe when I was FOUR.

Meanwhile back at the pool, well meaning friends tried to warn me. By late afternoon my back was starting to feel a wee bit warm and I thought about sunscreen for a nano-second, but my children blissfully sliding time and again down a waterslide and my need to be waiting at the bottom because, after all, how could I trust the no less than THREE lifeguards on duty, seemed the more pressing matter.

By the time we left the pool, my upper body was the approximate color of a ruby red grape. I radiated enough heat to toast a marshmallow and people just passing by clucked in sympathy and then, I don’t doubt, laughed uproariously when out of my earshot at how stupid some people can be.

Phase two. Now, a few days later, I am currently in phase two of the sunburn process, phase one being the getting burnt part.

Phase two is the back-slapping phase. In this phase people who have never shown even the slightest iota of interest in you previously, people who don’t even KNOW you, will suddenly be seized by the need to slap you on the back.

It’s as if there is a primordial siren call of seared skin. Seemingly unbidden they are moved to “slap!” you on the back with a hearty hail fellow well met even if they know not why.

As you cringe and slither to the floor in a heap of blinding red hot pain, they are left to state the obvious to soothe you, “little burnt huh?” “Little burnt huh?” is obviously code for “I hate you enormously and I wish to see you dead!,” that is the only possible explanation for this.

The only possible defense to back slapping is to make the universally recognized sunburn warning noise whereby you grit your teeth, pull back your lips, inhale briskly and spasm your body inward in the standing equivalent of the fetal position.

Sure, they’ll STILL slap you on the back, but with these motions you are slightly less likely to want to punch them. As if you could really lift your arms to take a swing anyway.

As the days have passed I have regained near normal movement in my upper limbs.

Shedding skin. I have also started to shed skin like a snake, lending whole new meaning to the phrase “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours!” My husband, lucky man that he is, gets to witness it all.

All I can say is that when it comes to reliving the sheer stupidity of the moment when I chose to eschew the necessity of sunscreen for the certainty of a not-so-slow burn, all I can say, is boy, was my face red.

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There’s no way of saying this without sounding like either a self-righteous health nut or a sadistic child hater - and I’m still somewhat on the fence over which is worse.

Nonetheless, I think I have cracked the case on the alarming rise in childhood obesity. Apparently, my peers and I have somehow managed to birth an entire generation that can’t go more than 45 minutes without eating.

 My generation will take the hit for a variety of offenses including, but not limited to parachute pants, Michael Jackson having a hit record, and The Smurfs.

However, I honestly don’t recall endless snacking in my own childhood. Somehow my mother managed to ferry me quite nicely through childhood without constant infusions of tiny bear-shaped crackers, dry cereal, cheese sticks and a variety of juices to sustain me.

How an age group that was able to survive their own childhoods seemingly able to subsist for days on nothing more than bubble gum, the occasional Cheeto, and pure air, managed to allow their own offspring to get so snack-addicted is beyond me.

Yet today, even as we encourage children to be active and “just do it,” we replace tenfold any calories they might actually burn by pressing snacks into their hands almost before they’ve left the field.

Schedule. If you’ve ever had a child who has played any sport, you know what a “snack parent” is. The dates of play - and often practice - are listed and you are duly informed that on one of those chosen dates, it will be your responsibility to provide all the young athletes their post-game refreshments.

Missing your child’s game is bad. Missing a game when you are the snack parent is unconscionable. The idea that healthy children could survive for an hour or two completely without a snack is completely out of the question.

The call-to-duty is a heady one. Apparently, our nation’s children derive nearly all their sustenance from the scraps of food they can cadge after various little league and pee-wee practices.

Seriously, is this snack thing as out of hand where you live?  

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