Birth Order and the Middle Child

Loud like a subway train. Demanding like a jail house warden. Defiant like a punk rock band. Independent like a fourth of July fire cracker. Aggressive like a blitzing linebacker.

She’s a jump-rope skipping prosecutor with a gift for gab, and an inferiority complex.

With a pink ribbon in her flaxen hair, this little lady is the poster child for Middle Child syndrome.

3 years younger than one brother and 4 years older than the other, she is dab smack in the middle of the family tree.

She’s angry, defiant, needs to be noticed peanut butter slopped between two slices of WonderBread.

My little lady is  the number two crammed between one and three. She’s the yellow double line in the black top. She’s the gap between two front teeth. She’s the middle child, always watching her back and her front.

Being the only girl in my stable of offspring, I had hoped that she would side step the middle child dilemma. I’ve always told her she was special, daddy’s little girl, the feminine apple of my eye. But my words are from France and my tongue forked apparently because she doesn’t buy it, doesn’t want to hear it, or simply, because of birth order evolution, cannot understand it.

Like some cosmic science experiment of embryonic fusion, the genetic dysfunction of middle child insecurity oozes from her pores like Shaquille O’Neil sweating at the free throw line.

She’ll sing as loud as she can while we try explaining homework to the older brother. She’ll tug on your sleeve while your busy doing abc’s with the little brother. She’ll stand up at dinner and recite the pledge of allegiance with a pork chop dangling from her lips. She’s the middle child equivalent of the Three Stooges, always on stage, always the wise guy.

My middle child is aggressive, difficult, a thumb just hit by a hammer. She’s Robin Williams with Tourette’s syndrome in a tutu.

I make it a point to concentrate on her life, her day at school, the test she needs help on, the swimming stroke she’s perfecting.

It doesn’t always work.

How can it? Why should it?

It’s God’s fault. He invented us. Birth order is part of his master plan.

God knew that middle children were a little crazier, a little needier, a little different.

Here’s what’s crazy about my middle child.

When it is all about her, when the spot light is shining upon her, she stalls for time. She milks the moment and meanders around in the spot light of attention.

I think she purposely forgets her homework so we have to remind her. To us it is discipline, but to the middle child, it’s called attention. When the middle child is in trouble, brothers younger and older are less significant in the family circle.There is no point she will not argue, no fact she won’t contest.I love my little girl, and I think she is going to conquer the world. I believe in the power of birth order. I think it goes back to Darwinian principles predicated on survival.When you are the oldest you are the first. You are special because of your birth order. When you are the baby, you are the last. You are pampered and spoiled and forgiven more easily than a kitten’s caress, because of your birth order.

 But when you are the middle child, you are stuck between a rock and a hard place. You are not the baby and not the first child to be oogled over. You simply are the middle.

Middle is OK, just not necessarily anything more.

Being Middle makes you fight for attention, fight for the spot light, yearn to be special. And for this reason, because she is a middle child, born with a chip on her shoulder, I am certain that she will.

Life’s Crazy™