The happy dance

 

“I looked at Antonia and I saw that she is beautiful,” my son said one quiet afternoon.

He was five years old. His sister, Antonia, had been born just a few weeks earlier.

In the months that followed, he became fiercely protective of her. He worried that the flies might hurt her while she slept outside. He scolded the neighbor kids when they were playing too loudly in the yard, afraid they’d wake her up. He grew visibly frustrated whenever she cried, irritated by my apparent inability to soothe her.

“Is she hungry, Mom? I think she’s hungry. Maybe she wants something better than milk? Can we please give her something else to eat?”

Honestly, it wasn’t a surprise. He had already started worrying about her when she was still inside me. One evening, while watching cartoons, he suddenly turned to me with a flash of inspiration:

“Mom, you should eat the TV! The baby is all alone in your belly and probably so bored! If you eat the TV, she could at least watch cartoons!”

And then came the turning point.

Antonia learned to stand. She would grab onto the furniture and bounce her little body up and down, making joyful sounds - her own version of dancing.

That summer day, Mihai was in his happy place: playing Crash Bandicoot on the PlayStation, entirely absorbed, lost to the world. Reality outside the game no longer existed.

Then Antonia crawled to the TV, pulled herself up, and started dancing, her wobbly body blocking the entire screen.

And just like that, the devoted big brother phase ended.

It would take another ten, maybe fifteen years before he looked at her again as the little sister who needed care and protection, rather than the loud, needy intruder constantly interfering with his very important business of being a boy.