When Niall Donnelly-Eaton was born at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh on a Saturday morning in May, his sister Mairead, three and a half, was at home in Marchmont with her grandmother. The introduction, two days later, did not go as planned.
The plan, drafted over months by Mairead's parents, had involved a small wrapped gift, a children's book about a new baby, and a careful staging of the first meeting at home rather than at the hospital. Mairead would come into the living room. Niall, asleep in his bassinet, would be in the corner. Mairead would meet him, and then open her gift, and then there would be tea.
What actually happened was that Mairead came in, took one long look at Niall, who was awake and making the small unbothered noises of a forty-eight-hour-old, and said, put him back.
She said it without any particular cruelty. She said it the way she had said, the previous week, that she did not want the green socks. It was a position. She was three and a half. Positions were her job.
Her mother, Aoife Donnelly, who was sitting on the couch, had been warned, by every book she had read, that this might happen. She had not, even so, been quite prepared for the exactness of the wording.
Her father, Liam Eaton, said the only thing he could think of, which was: he is going to stay for a while, sweetheart, and we are going to figure it out together.
Mairead did not respond. She went into the kitchen and asked for a biscuit. Her grandmother, sensibly, gave her one.
The literature on sibling introductions is voluminous and largely sensible. It will tell you to give the older child a doll to practise with months in advance, to involve them in the room preparation, to let them choose a small gift to give the baby, to read books on the subject, to talk often about the new family member.
Aoife and Liam had done all of these things. They had bought the doll in February. They had let Mairead help choose, from a small shop in Bruntsfield, a knitted bear that had been waiting in the bassinet for the baby's arrival. They had read three books.
None of it had prevented the put him back.
What the literature is less helpful on is what to do in the moment after. The first hour after the introduction. The first day. The first week. The long stretch of small daily renegotiations during which the older child works out, in her own time, what this new person in the house actually means.
Mairead's first week, by her parents' account, went like this.
Day one: she ignored the baby with what her grandmother, who has six grandchildren, called impressive professional commitment. She asked, several times, when the baby was going home. She accepted, at bedtime, an extra story.
Day two: she touched the baby's foot once, briefly, and then washed her hands. She refused to look at him while her mother was feeding him. She climbed into her mother's lap during a feed and lay across her mother's legs, in what was either solidarity or strategy.
Day three: she announced, at breakfast, that the baby's name was wrong, and that he should be called Strawberry. Her father said that was a lovely name. She said no, she was joking. She named him, instead, Wee Man. Wee Man stuck in the household for about three weeks.
Day four: she showed him, with great seriousness, her favourite book. He did not respond, being four days old. She seemed to find this acceptable.
Day five: she asked, for the first time, to hold him. Her father sat with her on the couch and put a pillow under her arm and placed Niall, swaddled, into the curve of her elbow. She held him for thirty-eight seconds before declaring that her arm was tired and that he could go back to mum.
Day six: she announced, at lunch, that Niall was her brother. She announced this as a piece of new information, in case her parents had not heard.
Day seven: she had a small but spectacular meltdown about a pair of yellow shoes that did not fit her any more. The meltdown was, her mother thought, not really about the shoes.
The thing the books do not quite say, Aoife has come to think, is that the older child is grieving. Not for the baby exactly. For the household she had, in which she was the only child, and in which her parents' attention had a particular shape that has now, irrevocably, been redistributed.
The grief is real. It comes out, in three-year-olds, as small odd events. A sudden refusal of a familiar food. A regression in toilet training. An attachment to a stuffed animal that had been ignored for months.
Mairead, in the second week, began wetting the bed for the first time in nearly a year. Her parents, who had been warned about this in one of the books, did not make it into a thing. They put a fresh sheet on. They put a fresh nightdress on her. They went back to bed.
In the third week, Mairead began, on her own initiative, to bring the baby small objects. A wooden block. A piece of lego. A leaf. She would place them in the bassinet beside him, with grave courtesy. Her parents removed them, gently, after she had gone to sleep.
In the fourth week, she sang to him for the first time. She sang a song from her nursery, mostly correctly, while he lay on the playmat and looked, with the unfocused gaze of a one-month-old, in approximately her direction.
Aoife, who had been bracing herself for months, found herself crying on the couch.
What helped, in their household, was not any one strategy. What helped was time, and the steady refusal to make Mairead's adjustments into a crisis. The wetting stopped after ten days. The meltdowns about shoes have, more or less, returned to their baseline frequency.
Niall, now five weeks old, is no longer Wee Man. He is just Niall. Mairead has stopped asking when he is going home. She has, instead, begun to ask why he cannot yet play.
She will be, her grandmother has told her, the kind of older sister who teaches him a great deal. Mairead has accepted this assignment with the seriousness with which she accepts most assignments, and has already begun, in her own way, to deliver.
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