By Shamu Ward and Chloe Cullen

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As the oldest of six kids, writer Chloe Cullen told herself that helping her siblings meant taking it–even if she took it from them herself.

Sometimes, being the oldest means stealing someone else’s fudge brownie sundae. 

Let me explain. 

My youngest sibling was born when I was in the third grade, around when I was nine years old. The constant motion in our house with four kids under the age of five  blurs my memory. Between getting home from school and the post-homework/pre-bedtime routine was running, screaming, chasing, dancing, and singing, often at the same time. On top of this, my dad anchored a stereo system attached to an iPod with my uncle’s library of thousands of iTunes purchases throughout the first two floors of the house. On top of December Christmas music to March Irish melodies to John Legend’s “Ordinary People,” we kids made messes and cleaned them up. (Mostly, I supervised the younger kids’  messes, then I told them to clean it up.) 

My siblings and I also frequently had playdates, so our house of eight people could grow approximately by one to four kids on any given day. We organized our dinner in shifts those nights, with the little kids eating first, or we would all cram into the long dining room table with thick wooden benches. My parents lived under the philosophy that there was always enough for others. If three more kids joined us for dinner, how much of a difference does that make when you’re already cooking for eight? 

Though I remember the hum most about my early adolescence, dinner was our shared quiet time.  

Dinners reflected the quick pace of our lives: rehydrated broccoli-cheese rice and chicken, pork, hot dogs, a Stouffer’s silver tin of frozen mac and cheese. On birthdays, we always had a Carvel ice cream cake and  stained our molars brown on the Oreo crumbles. One particularly great month, my mom discovered “pizza loaf,” a popped-open Pillsbury canned French loaf covered with marinara, shredded mozzarella, and bagged pepperonis. She stopped  making pizza loaf when I raved to the friends I invited over, frothing at the mouth, that this was the best food we’d ever had. 

There were two types of dinners: dining room and breakfast room. The breakfast room had a wooden picnic table colored with crayon scribbles and covered in a plastic tablecloth, often seasonally themed with pumpkins or snowflakes. The dining room had  a heavy-duty wooden table  for dinners where we ate with our parents to practice our etiquettes. Dining room table dinners were more formal: meat, grain, green, good manners, minimal fidgeting. 

Breakfast table manners? They consisted of a more feral eat-before-someone-else-eats-your-food mentality while our parents weren’t watching. The dining-table practice of holding a fork correctly still applied, but it could also be aptly used to snipe a sibling’s leftover rice or chicken breast bits if they didn’t finish them fast enough. As the oldest, I was the primary snatcher. 

Stealing candy from babies is juvenile. 

Stealing dinner from them? More satisfying than you’d think. 

One summer night, with most of my siblings gone to visit my grandpa, my mom took me and my brother Carrick out to dinner. We always went to Clyde’s for special occasions. Their bread basket and butter, so light and unsalted it was added more out of habit than flavor, still brings pavlovian responses of birthday bisques and candles in ice cream. We rarely went out to eat, but this summer while I was in high school, my mom, Carrick, and I were going to Clyde’s. 

Carrick is the third of the six kids, and he represents the oldest member of “the bottom four,” the contingent of siblings born within five years of each other. Carrick and I, on the other hand, are five years apart, which feels like a lifetime apart when you still measure the gap between first and third grade as infinitely huge.

At Clyde’s, Carrick talked halfway through dinner about ordering a fudge brownie sundae. This was something reserved for the group of us to all split on special occasions, spoons clashing for the last melting bit of vanilla ice cream or a whiff of whipped cream. Tonight, he had the chance to have a sundae all to himself. 

If Carrick was going to have one, I thought, I’ll have one, too. “I won’t order for you, though,” I warned him. “You have to order it for yourself.” This wisdom, my teenage self sensed, was immensely important to impart on my fourth grade brother at this specific dinner. 

When the waitress came around, asking if we wanted a dessert menu, Carrick said nothing. I looked at him for a second before I asked to see one, though I knew what we would get. I was buying him time to order the thing he already told us he wanted to buy. I let him look at it, read all the options, study it as fervently as someone memorizing lines. My mom and I encouraged him to get what he wanted, and he shrugged it off to continue staring at the menu. The only thing stopping him from getting what he wanted, I reasoned, was himself. 

When the waitress returned, seeing if we wanted to order from the dessert menu that we had held onto, Carrick sat silently. He opened his mouth, closed it, kept it closed. 

The waitress turned to me. 

“I’ll have the fudge brownie sundae,” I said, punctuation on a sentence Carrick never started. 

One, and only one,  fudge brownie sundae coming up. 

And I ate all of it, out of principle. 

I ate the brownie corners with French vanilla ice cream, the shaved pine nuts that I hated, the flavorless and oily whipped cream peaks dotted around the plate. I thought this was funny and instructive at the time: if you want something, take it. Meanwhile, Carrick pulled a napkin over his face and wore it for the rest of the meal. Even when I backed down from my original stance of preventing him from having any of my sundae–“because it’s mine, I ordered it”–and offered him a bite, he didn’t pull himself out from beneath the napkin. 

As I ate this sundae, physically mine but ideologically stolen, I imagined myself in some maternal role. This would help him later, I thought. He needs to ask for what he wants. What he wanted, maybe, was to not be harassed by his older sister, but when you’re the oldest, there’s one mode for ordering a la mode.

Process

Together, Shamu and I brainstormed how we see food. We both talk often about our families and how they influence our work. Shamu is a middle child, and I’m the oldest, so we laughed about how the oldest siblings (in their family and mine) took food and ran in a “oldest sibling” privilege.

Shamu has a great eye for graphic design, so they edited my drafts with helpful comments then structured the story with my family pictures and illustrations on Canva. I’m so happy with how it turned out!