My Parents The Pre Cogs

My younger brother is legendary in his tendency to always “plan ahead”, but in the most anxiety-inducing way possible. He literally never has enjoyed any joyful occasion ever because he was already thinking of the clean-up, and his fragile mind has survived things like the Covid Pandemic or the company he worked at going under only through sheer thinking of the “after”.

My family and I hoped that marrying would change his behaviour for the better, but instead, my brother’s strangeness infected his wife.

How bad did it get? They had a daughter. I came to visit them a week after she was born, and, as I held her in my arms, my brother started this conversation.

Brother: “She’s cute, isn’t she? Pity we don’t know how to punish her already.”

Me: “What? What does that have to do with anything?”

Brother: “[Wife] and I are still discussing how we will punish her when she starts to misbehave, I’m in favour of ti–”

Me: “Whoa whoa [Brother], slow down, she’s barely a week old and you and [Wife] are already thinking of *punishment*?”

Wife: “It’s only a year away, you do know that, right?”

Me: “It’s a whole year of [Daughter] being a baby! Why would you waste it thinking about how to stop her misbehaviour?!”

Brother: “But it’s a year!”

By that point, the daughter was made upset by our loud arguing, and our circular conversation had to be cut short. The daughter is four now, and the parents are already looking for dysgraphia and dyslexia experts because she doesn’t draw letters and because she has perfectly normal trouble sounding out words on picture books, and any time she tries to ask for something, anything, they try to list out all other options she’s missing out on by making that choice. I would not wish her existence on my worst enemy.