My younger brother, J-Rad and I may have hated each other during the day growing up, but at night we had a truce. We would sneak into each other’s rooms and wake each other up when we were too scared to go to the bathroom alone.
No matter how hard we hit each other that evening, after ‘lights out’ we were a team, and our parents knew nothing about it.
Thanks to the cup of warm juice that Mum gave us religiously before bed, in the wee hours of the morning, one of us would bolt terrified into the other’s room, and shake them with - ‘Can you come to the toilet with me?’ The other would rise, without complaint, happy to provide this reciprocal service.
J-Rad was afraid of large mountain bears. I was afraid of ghosts. Our job was to stand guard outside the closed toilet door, because we both knew bears and ghosts only preyed on those who peed alone.
Before J-Rad was old enough to escort me to the toilet, I used to pee the bed. (In my defense, we lived in an old farm house, and the toilet was a long way away.) I remember thinking: I really need to pee, but there’s just no fucking way I’m getting out of bed – or ghosts will get me!
In the mornings when my parents asked what had happened, I’d tell them I must have gone in my sleep. So they implemented a chart with colored stars, and I’d get a gold one if my sheets were dry. When that didn’t work, Dad gave me acupuncture.
Only now does it strike me as odd that a six year old child, would be more afraid of telling her parents her fears, than getting stuck with hundreds of tiny needles three times a week.
J-Rad and I continued our nightly ritual for more years than we’d like to admit. Then gradually we outgrew our monsters, and our need to wake each other up.
When I think about our sibling relationship, this story kind of sums us up... because even thought we knew our fears were completely irrational (there are no bears in Australia and neither had ever seen a ghost), on a deeper level we cared enough to respect each other’s inner demons.
And we still do.
