RE: Middle child...middle finger?
September 12, 2015 at 9:19 pm
(This post was last modified: September 12, 2015 at 9:38 pm by Aroura.)
First, I'm sorry to hear some of the heart wrenching stories, or even just comments here about parents. Losty and MTL, yikes. 
I'm the eldest of 2, and I was totally treated as the golden child. To this day I have serious guilt issues when dealing with my dad and brother, because I feel my brother was often treated unfairly by my dad.
Apparently, I was a perfect baby (I doubt this, though even other relatives say I rarely cried or fussed, to the point my mom actually took me to the doctor worried about how quiet I was).
My brother came along when I was just 1.5 years old, and he had jaundice. He cried a LOT, and he fussed a LOT, and my father automatically disliked him, I think, right from the moment he was born.
I think my mother treated us as equally as she could, but she's a patient women with mothering in her blood.
In the eyes of my dad, however, I could do no wrong, and my brother could do no right. If my brother and I were rough housing, and we broke a lamp or something, it would end up being my brother's fault, and he would get punished, not me. Obviously this was harder on my little bro than it was on me, but I'm a VERY empathetic person and I love my brother, so after a while, I started taking the blame for everything I could. This only made things worse, because my poor bro, already full of resentment and anger, found he could act out more and let me take the fall (since the most I got was a head shake, or more often, a nothing at all). Anyway, turns out my mother and I both ended up enabling my brother's bad behavior in an attempt to make up for my asshole of a dad.
My dad hit my little brother when he was a baby. My mother told me she left him for about a week, but RELIGION drove her back. That is, she's was the wife, and it was up to her to obey her husband. That and the idea of being a single mom apparently scared her more than an abusive husband (he never hit my mom, he's a small man, but he was verbally abusive to an extreme. When I was small, my mom was still an active women. Horseback riding, camping, fishing. As I grew older, she withdrew more and more from all of us, until she basically locked herself in her room. She's pretty much never came out again, figuratively speaking).
She coddled my brother when he was little to try and make up for it, but nothing can fix an abusive parent except getting away from them.
Anyway...not sure this is even related to birth order. I suspect if my brother had been born first, my father would have been more tolerant, but I could be completely wrong.
More on topic:
My husband is a middle child, elder sister was always in trouble but got a ton of attention, baby brother got all the rest of the attention. I've heard stories. He locked himself in his bedroom as a teenager once, and his parents DID NOT NOTICE for 2 days. He also says he did not homework for nearly a whole year in 8th grade, and his parents did not know until the teacher called them at the end of the year to tell them he was failing everything.
I've seen it even as adults. His siblings get smothered with positive attention, he's lucky to get a phone call once a year. It's gotten better since he has a child of his own now, his parents give him lots more compliments about being a good parent, but it really feels like far too little, too late.
So yeah, I think there actually is something to being in the middle, or even just second.
I'm the eldest of 2, and I was totally treated as the golden child. To this day I have serious guilt issues when dealing with my dad and brother, because I feel my brother was often treated unfairly by my dad.
Apparently, I was a perfect baby (I doubt this, though even other relatives say I rarely cried or fussed, to the point my mom actually took me to the doctor worried about how quiet I was).
My brother came along when I was just 1.5 years old, and he had jaundice. He cried a LOT, and he fussed a LOT, and my father automatically disliked him, I think, right from the moment he was born.
I think my mother treated us as equally as she could, but she's a patient women with mothering in her blood.
In the eyes of my dad, however, I could do no wrong, and my brother could do no right. If my brother and I were rough housing, and we broke a lamp or something, it would end up being my brother's fault, and he would get punished, not me. Obviously this was harder on my little bro than it was on me, but I'm a VERY empathetic person and I love my brother, so after a while, I started taking the blame for everything I could. This only made things worse, because my poor bro, already full of resentment and anger, found he could act out more and let me take the fall (since the most I got was a head shake, or more often, a nothing at all). Anyway, turns out my mother and I both ended up enabling my brother's bad behavior in an attempt to make up for my asshole of a dad.
My dad hit my little brother when he was a baby. My mother told me she left him for about a week, but RELIGION drove her back. That is, she's was the wife, and it was up to her to obey her husband. That and the idea of being a single mom apparently scared her more than an abusive husband (he never hit my mom, he's a small man, but he was verbally abusive to an extreme. When I was small, my mom was still an active women. Horseback riding, camping, fishing. As I grew older, she withdrew more and more from all of us, until she basically locked herself in her room. She's pretty much never came out again, figuratively speaking).
She coddled my brother when he was little to try and make up for it, but nothing can fix an abusive parent except getting away from them.
Anyway...not sure this is even related to birth order. I suspect if my brother had been born first, my father would have been more tolerant, but I could be completely wrong.
More on topic:
My husband is a middle child, elder sister was always in trouble but got a ton of attention, baby brother got all the rest of the attention. I've heard stories. He locked himself in his bedroom as a teenager once, and his parents DID NOT NOTICE for 2 days. He also says he did not homework for nearly a whole year in 8th grade, and his parents did not know until the teacher called them at the end of the year to tell them he was failing everything.
I've seen it even as adults. His siblings get smothered with positive attention, he's lucky to get a phone call once a year. It's gotten better since he has a child of his own now, his parents give him lots more compliments about being a good parent, but it really feels like far too little, too late.
So yeah, I think there actually is something to being in the middle, or even just second.
“Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
