No Fight Zone

One of the topics that didn't make it to the top three topics for this week's contest in the Hive Learners community is sibling rivalry but I'm going to write on it anyway.

_{Photo by Diana Parkhouse}

You see, growing up in a house where your mom was the only female, there was bound to be some disagreement and some occasional fist throwing between siblings but that didn't happen much in my house. My parents gave birth to four boys and we all had a reasonable amount of age gap between us. I'm the third son and I happen to be eight years older than the little guy, the last child.

But although the age gap was one of the reasons why a lot of our arguments didn't end up with us fighting each other (because it was always obvious who would win the fight even before it began), one strong reason why we never fought that much was our dad. Having four sons required that you be a strong father and my dad was more than that. The man was a disciplinarian (I say 'was' because he has gone a little bit soft on us now that we're all grown ups), who wasted no time to put us in our place whenever we went out of line.

My dad had one rule and it was a pretty simple rule, no one was to hit anyone in his house. If someone offends you, go report to him and he would punish that person himself. Of course this rule didn't exactly sit well with my eldest brother because there were times where he felt like strangling me but he couldn't because he was scared of what my dad would do to him, and because I knew that, I wasn't that scared of him (my eldest brother).

I remember one day where both of my brothers had decided to settle their differences using their fist. My dad wasn't around that day so they had fought while myself and my little brother watched with so much interest. We both knew going to separate them would be a futile mission as both of them were stronger than the both of us so instead of catching a blow or two to the eyes while trying to separate their fight, we had stood by and watched.

It turned out that them fighting each other was the first match, kinda like a warm up. The real match began when my dad got back from work and myself and my little one had snitched on them two. My dad had asked them if what we had said was true and after they had confirmed it, he had asked them to go back to whatever they were doing.

And then around 2am later that night, I heard my old man professionally swinging his sword (cane) and both of my brothers jumping off of their bed and running towards the door for safety. But you see the door was locked and so they were doomed. They received so much beating that night that I was confused the only reason my dad had stopped was because he was tired and not because my mom had pleaded with him to forgive them.

Ever since that day, we tried our best never to fight in that house. We only abuse ourselves and just let it end there but if we must fight, we make sure not to destroy anything at home and never to snitch.