Here's my contribution to the S/T Valentine's Day Exchange! This is a fic written for elleisforlovee. Happy Valentine's Day, bb! Hope you enjoy this :)
For the rest of you, here's elle's prompt: Sybil and Tom have a disagreement over their different fundamental parenting styles. What caused the argument and how do they resolve it?
For a bit of background, this story is canon up to 3x05 (obvs). Sybil gives birth to a girl, Susan, and the family of three returns to Ireland with her parents in 1922. It so happens that Sybil is pregnant on the return trip too, and in Ireland she gives birth (much more peacefully than at Downton) to another girl, Sarah. Tom continues his work as a journalist, though he occasionally helps his youngest brother, Sean, in his work as a mechanic. Sybil gets back into nursing, and eventually trains to be a midwife. Three years after their return, their son Michael is born. The story takes place in 1927, when Susan, Sarah and Michael are seven, five and two respectively.
I get into how Sybil and Tom's parental habits differ in the story, but here's a bit more on that to help set the scene: Tom is one of five children in a family in which both parents worked and very hard and in which the older siblings were tasked with taking care of the younger ones. Thus, Tom's parenting-style is a bit hands-off. He expects to his kids to be self-sufficient and to solve their own squabbles. Sybil was raised by a nanny and a governess, so she grew up having someone there to hold her hand through childhood's difficult moments and to adjudicate fights between herself, Edith and Mary. Consequently, she is more inclined to hover over the kids and worry about little things. (For the record, as a parent myself, there is no "right" way to do it except for what works for you and your kid. We learn how to be parents just as our kids learn to be people and everyone makes some mistakes in the process. Anyway.) Given these differing approaches, Tom and Sybil find a way to balance each other out, but when our story starts, their daughters' present a more difficult challenge by doing what sisters do—fight.
"You said I could ride the scooter!"
"It's mine!"
"But you said I could use it!"
"Well, I need it now, so you can't use it."
"That's not fair! Whenever I want to ride it, you always take it back!"
"It's been there for you to ride all afternoon, but you only want it when I do."
"But I was using it!"
"Well, you can't any more!"
"I'm not done. It's not fair if I'm not done."
"Well, too bad, 'cause it's mine."
"MAAAAAAM!"
"MAM!"
Sybil groaned from her seat in the study. She had been listening to her two daughters argue for the last five minutes and dreading this very moment.
Susan and Sarah Branson were two years apart. They shared a room in the family's small flat just off Merrion Square, and until Susan had started school the year before, they were thick as thieves, always willing to share their toys and each always eager to include the other in a scheme. But for all the good things she'd come to learn and love at school, Susan had also picked up some bad habits, none worse than treating her younger siblings with impatience and condescension. At two years of age, Michael Branson did not particularly notice his oldest sister's change in attitude. But Sarah, who was perhaps a bit too inclined to hang on her sister's every word, very much did and took the brunt of it. Sarah's reaction to having lost her favorite playmate—hot-headed and stubborn—would have been amusing to her parents in its predictability (she was a Crawley-Branson after all), if it did not so often result in almost daily fights between the girls.
At first Sybil didn't worry too much about it, remembering very well her own endless rows with both Mary and Edith when they were all still in the nursery—and even more so when Mary and Edith fancied themselves too old for the nursery while Sybil remained too young yet to leave it. As a younger sister herself, she more easily empathized with Sarah, whom Sybil knew wanted nothing more than to be in her older sister's good esteem. Tom, for his part, was the second eldest of his five siblings and was more inclined to understand that Susan—a conscientious and thoughtful girl in every respect but for her recent harsh treatment of her sister—was growing and blossoming and, consequently, wanted room to be her own person away from the trappings of her early childhood.
So the young parents generally left the girls to their own devices, setting only the rule that there be no fighting at the dinner table. Sybil was always the one more eager to intercede, but whenever she did, Tom would remind her that his mother always made her kids work out any disagreements among themselves.
"And look how well we turned out," he'd said with a smile.
Sybil would have to take a deep breath and suppress an eye-roll. It had been a bumpy road, but Sybil and Aileen Branson had come to love each other dearly—even if Sybil and her mother-in-law still found plenty of things about which to disagree.
On this particular Saturday, Tom had taken Michael to his mother's house, where he'd likely leave his son to be doted on by his granny and spend the morning in the garage in the alley behind the house with his youngest brother, Sean, helping him rebuild the engine of an old Renault that Sean had found abandoned near a dump outside of town.
With the baby gone and the girls more or less able to look after themselves, Sybil would have a chance to go over her notes from her home visits she'd done this week for newly delivered mothers. Having trained as a midwife soon after Sarah was born, Sybil loved helping usher women through a process that had been both painful and traumatic for her the first time she'd had to endure it. Her favorite part of the job was the follow-up visits she made, during which the mothers—most of them poor and often responsible for multiple children—loved nothing more than getting a chance to talk with someone who understood what they'd gone through and who they knew would listen. The visits were both enjoyable and instructive, so Sybil always took copious notes and condensed them into a brief she shared with the doctors at the hospital (particularly the male doctors who did not naturally have the emotional connection to pregnancy or birth that women did).
Sybil had several visits she wanted to get through before Monday, and her plan had been to finish today. It had been, at least, before her daughters began bickering.
Sybil rubbed her face in her hands as she heard two sets of footsteps run up from the back of the flat toward the study, where Sybil was sitting at one of two small desks that faced each other, one for Tom and one for Sybil. Of course, as soon as the girls stepped into the room, they began talking—yelling, rather—over each other.
"SHE SAID I COULD USE HER SCOOTER!"
"SHE'S HAD IT IN HER ROOM ALL MORNING BUT ONLY NOW THAT I WANT TO RIDE IT TO MAERA'S!"
"BUT I WANT TO RIDE IT NOW!"
"IT'S MINE AND I SAID YOU CAN'T!"
"ENOUGH!"
Their mother shouting—an extremely rare occurrence—sufficed to stop both girls short.
Sybil took a deep breath. "Now," she began, "Mummy has quite a lot of work to do today, and I'm counting on you to be good girls."
Susan and Sarah looked down to the floor contritely.
"To start," Sybil continued, "where is the blasted scooter?"
"In our room," Sarah answered.
"Bring it here," Sybil said.
"But—" Susan cut in.
"She's just going to fetch it, darling," Sybil said.
Susan rolled her eyes, and Sybil held in a smile. Of Tom and Sybil's three children, Susan was the most easily recognizable as a Branson. Sarah was a carbon copy of her mother, and Michael, though his features favored his father, was more of a mix with his father's eyes, nose and chin and a head of his mother's curly brown hair. Susan, meanwhile, was her father's daughter through and through. In an ironic twist of fate, she had been born in England, but she was the most like Tom's side of the family, having inherited her grandmother's looks as well as her Irish pride and inclination toward cheek—traits that Sybil had run into in their original bearer on plenty of occasions.
When Sarah came back into the room, Sybil took the rickety contraption, built by Tom's brother Kieran on the occasion of Susan's fourth birthday, and placed it behind Tom's desk. Kieran had offered to make another for Sarah when she'd reached the same milestone, but Tom and Sybil had declined, wanting their girls to learn to share their things and assuming, perhaps naively, that they would do so happily.
"What are you doing?" Susan asked. "I want to take it to Meara's!"
"That's where it's going to stay until we find a way to resolve this dispute," Sybil said.
"But—"
Sybil's raised eyebrows and stern expression told Susan that she was not to argue. "It was my hope that we'd spend a quiet day in the house, but that seems unlikely now, so let's get our coats and hats, shall we, and we'll go join Michael and your father at granny's house for luncheon."
"Meara invited me to come by today," Susan said, trying to hold back the whine in her voice.
"You did not ask for permission, dear, so it was wrong of you to assume you could. Now, let's get ready please."
With a heavy sigh, Susan turned and started toward her room. Sybil looked back at the scattered notes on her desk with a wistful sigh. She'd not be done before Monday, but she was resolved not to wait another minute before talking to Tom about what they could do to get the girls to get along better. Her work would have to wait. She turned back to the doorway into the study so she could walk to her room to get herself ready and saw that Sarah was still in the room, standing at the doorway with a confused expression on her face.
"What is it, darling?"
"Mam, what's a . . . a dispute?"
Sybil laughed at the earnestness of the young girl's question. At least no one could say her daughters weren't learning something.
XXX
The trip didn't take long, and as both girls enjoyed getting to ride on the tram, it was for the most part uneventful and free of bickering. As soon as they arrived at Aileen's, Susan and Sarah both quickly shed their coats and ran up the stairs to join their grandmother and brother in the nursery. Tom's two sisters had shared the room when they were growing up, but once all the Branson children had left the nest, it became where their children played when they came to visit their granny.
"Oh!" Aileen exclaimed as she saw the two girls come in. "To what do I owe this surprise?" She asked standing from the rocking chair and setting Michael down on the floor from his spot on her lap. Michael, spotting his mother, began clapping and toddled over in her direction.
"Mam said we could come join Michael and da," Sarah said, always eager to please.
"I need to have a talk with Tom," Sybil said, bending over to hug Michael and push him toward his grandmother again.
"Well, we'll have to add some water to the stew," Aileen said with a sigh.
"Don't worry about that," Sybil said, moving to step back into the hallway. "Just give the girls Tom's portion. He can go without."
Aileen smiled at how transparent Sybil could be when she was irritated with Tom.
Sybil walked back down the stairs and out the back door. At the back of the small yard, the creaky wood gate opened up into the alley. Just on the other side, the old car sat under a canopy that had been built by Sean specifically to protect it from the elements. As soon as the door clanked shut behind her, Sean's head jerked up from where he had been leaning over the engine.
"It's for you," he called down to the floor, where Tom was laying underneath the car.
Tom slid out and pulled himself up. He smiled when he looked at Sybil, but the smile only lasted a brief second. He could see clearly in her expression that whatever the reason she came to find him, it was serious.
"All right, I'll be back," Tom said, following Sybil, who smiled at the smirk forming on Sean's face as she turned toward the alley.
After they'd walked down to the street, Tom asked, "So what's happened?"
"We have to do something about the girls," she said. "Their fighting is getting to be too much. I'm starting to wonder whether it'll have a lasting effect on their relationship."
Tom smiled and let out a long sigh of relief. "With the look on your face, I thought it was something really serious."
"This is serious, Tom!"
"Love, we've talked about this," he said, taking a step closer to her. "They're kids! Let them work it out on their own."
"But they're not working it out. All they do is fight."
"They're not going to learn how to get along if we're always interceding."
"Or they're going to learn that it's OK to be at each other's throats and treat one another unfairly."
"Sybil, fighting is what siblings do. It's all I ever did with mine. Surely, even at Downton, your experience was not so different."
Sybil brought her hands to her temples to try to contain her exasperation. She thought of her own sisters how often at odds they had been as children.
"I don't want them to just be sisters," Sybil said finally. "I want them to be friends."
Tom smiled. "I want that too, but we should be ready for that not to be the case—at least not while they're young. When they've grown and matured, they'll learn to love each other."
"Like Mary and Edith do?" Sybil said with an eye roll.
"OK, the girls have obviously upset you," Tom said, a bit of teasing in his voice, "if you're being sarcastic about the only people in your family who came to our wedding."
Sybil smiled, in spite of herself, at the reminder that despite their constant misgivings about her choices, Mary and Edith did support her and, when push came to shove, would do the same for one another.
"Ok, maybe that wasn't fair, and you're right to say that they should be independent, but that doesn't mean we should offer no guidance at all!"
"But that's not the case," Tom insisted. "They have rules to follow."
Sybil rolled her eyes. "Right. No yelling and no elbows on the table at dinner. Did your mother have no other rules for you as a child?"
Tom opened his mouth to offer a retort but none came. His shoulders dropped and he laughed humorlessly. "She did. All right, fair point."
"Darling, it isn't the rules that I'm worried about. They know what they're supposed to do. Share their things and treat each other with kindness, but they fight on because they know we won't do anything to stop them."
"Forcing them to apologize to each other when they don't mean it will just foster resentment."
"We could do more to help them resolve what they're fighting about—today, for example, they both decided they wanted to ride that bloody scooter at the same time."
Tom pinched the bridge of his nose in irritation. "Fecking Kieran knew exactly what he was doing when he gave us that thing. I'll just build another one."
"Tom, don't be silly!"
"It'll solve the problem!"
"In the short term, but it'll also teach them that they don't have to share because if they fight over something long enough, another will magically appear. That's not how the world works."
"Love, they are seven and five years old, their brains are positively illogical, do you honestly want to serve as judge and jury for every single one of their squabbles?"
"I want them to understand that sharing is important not because their parents are nonsensically tyrannical, but because we have limited resources. I want them to understand that they should be kind to each other because when they grow up in this unkind world there may be times when all they have is each other."
Tom furrowed his brow. "I want that too. You don't think we're doing enough for that to be true?"
Sybil buried her face in her hands, and Tom immediately stepped forward and brought her into his arms.
"It was a long morning," she said into his chest. "I panicked, and when I panic, I question everything I do as a mother. Maybe if I didn't work so much, I'd spend more time with them and they wouldn't be so crabby all the time. I'm a mother, I should devote myself to my children!"
Tom kissed the top of her head. "Oh, my darling, now it's you who is being illogical."
"Tom, it's true!"
"It's also true that if you gave up your job, you'd be unhappy and the girls would think that women have to give up everything for their children, and you know that's not true, not for us. Being a midwife makes you happy and that happiness is reflected in how you love them and Michael. They're healthy. They're clever. They are doing fine. We are doing fine."
Sybil pulled her hands away from her face and wrapped her arms around his waist. "We are, aren't we?"
"Yes," he said dropping a short kiss on her lips.
Sybil sighed. "I just wish they wouldn't fight. They're so mean to one another sometimes, and I know that sisters are sometimes but . . . the world is unfair. I want our home to reflect the world as we wish it worked, not how it actually does. If we can manage that, then when they're on their own maybe they'll want to fight to make it better."
"Like you've done?"
Sybil smiled. "You too."
"So what do you suppose we do?"
"Well, much as I want to, we can't burn the scooter."
Tom laughed. "They often act like the bloody legislators I have to cover. Perhaps we should ask them to write and adopt a set of laws on who gets to use it and when. That'll take their attention for a good long while."
Sybil pulled back, eyes alight.
"Love, I was only joking."
Sybil smiled. "No, you weren't."
XXX
"Why should she get a chance to write laws about the scooter, when it's mine!" Susan protested later that afternoon, when now back at their own house, her parents sat her and her sister in the parlor and shared their plan.
"Now, Susan," Tom said. "What form of government do we function under in this house?"
Susan let out a long dramatic sigh.
"Well?" Tom prodded.
"A socialist democracy," Susan answered.
"And what does that mean?" Sybil asked.
"The majority rules," Susan answered.
"And?" Tom prodded.
"Everything belongs to everyone."
"Good," Sybil said. "Now, Uncle Kieran did give you the scooter, but with the thought that your siblings would also get to enjoy it when the time came. I know that seems unfair, but you had plenty of time to enjoy it before Sarah had any interest in it, didn't you?"
"And you, silly girl," Tom said with a wink at Sarah, who giggled at her father's teasing, "need to understand that while this particular toy is to be shared, your sister is entitled to having her own things, just as you are, and you need to respect her privacy and boundaries."
"Mmmkay," Sarah said. "I just like playing with her. She used to like playing with me."
"You're just such a bother sometimes!" Susan said, though not unkindly. "I'll play with you, if it doesn't have to be all the time. Don't you ever want to play on your own?"
"But I like playing with you!"
Susan couldn't help but laugh, a sound that warmed her parents' hears to hear. "Oh, fine. Let's go play the government and write out these scooter laws. We'll have a convention and I shall be recording secretary and you can be the delegate."
Sybil looked at Tom, grinning at how well Susan remembered the legislative terms Tom would teach her when he read his newspaper aloud to her.
Meanwhile, Sarah's eyes brightened and she immediately ran from the parlor and into their room. "Are you coming?"
Susan rolled her eyes. "Hold on!" Turning back to her parents she said, "I have one more question."
"Yes?" Tom said.
"Will we always be a democracy?"
"We will," Sybil and Tom said in unison.
Susan smiled impishly. "Just checking," she said, then ran off after her sister.
"What was that about?" Sybil said standing from the sofa to pick up Michael, who had been playing in the corner of the room with a wood train.
Tom laughed. "We have a very clever child."
"What do you mean?" Sybil said, as she made faces at the boy in her arms.
Tom stood too and walked over to where they were. He tickled his son, and Michael squirmed in his mother's arms. "Well, we've told her we live in a democracy, and I think she's just realized that the children outnumber the parents."