Birth Chaos

This week's topic is birth order, and how it affects... well, everything.  Apparently I'm the first poster that isn't the oldest child.  Hooray for a change of perspective, and I hope that it's entertaining for everyone.

I'm the youngest of my parents' children.  I have two older sisters, and we were all born four years apart.  My sisters argue to this day that, as the youngest, I was the "favored" child, and in a way, I suppose that was true.  There wasn't much pressure on me to help out around the house, and I certainly got pretty much anything that I asked for.  But I don't believe that this was an end result of favoritism; I think it was the easiest, most convenient method that my parents could come up with to keep me entertained and occupied while they dealt with the challenges of raising my sisters.  I certainly didn't grow up feeling neglected, or ignored - I was perfectly content with what I had, for the most part.

I grew up in front of electronic screens, whether they were a television or a computer monitor.  My dad taught me how to manipulate MS-DOS as soon as I had figured out typing (sometime around age 4), and I was playing games on the computer from that point on.  We got a Nintendo not long after it was released, and it was fairly common to find me perched in front of it at any point when I wasn't on the computer or outside playing make-believe.  There wasn't any regulation, really, when it came to how much time I spent on any of my entertainment options - my sisters kept my parents busy enough that (I think, at least) it was more beneficial for me to be kept occupied and out of the way most of the time.  Aside from the baseball practices and games that were a regular part of my life for twelve years, I entertained myself with whatever was available, and my parents were more than happy to support me in that.  I had conflicting standards to live up to, in terms of school - my oldest sister was very intelligent, but my other sister struggled with most subjects.  I was always under the impression that my parents were more proud of my older sister, because of her performance in school, and so I set that standard for myself.  I got frustrated with anything other than perfection; at one point, when I got a 98 on a math test, I locked myself in my room and cried for hours.  Interestingly, this caused a rift between both of my sisters and me - my older sister thought that I was trying to show her up, and my other sister resented that I had such an easier time with... well, everything.  I really didn't get a lot of pressure from my parents to do well in school - it was just how it worked out, for the most part.

Fast forward to my years in middle and high school.  My living situation had changed drastically; I didn't have two sisters in the house to draw attention away from me anymore.  My oldest sister was living with her boyfriend and children; my other sister was living with her boyfriend.  For the first time in my life, I had the undivided attention of my parents, and I had no idea how to handle it... and neither did they, for the most part.  With the attention came expectations, and those only grew as the years went on.  Neither of my sisters succeeded at college (my oldest sister tried and failed, the other didn't even try), and so my parents put a lot of pressure on me to get into a good college.  Neither of my sisters turned out terribly responsible, and so my parents did what they thought was necessary to make me a responsible person.  There were very few parts of my life that remained free from criticism at this point, and as might be expected, I chafed under this new attention.  To me, it felt like my freedom had been completely eradicated.  Nothing seemed like it was good enough for my parents any more - straight A's in school weren't praised, or even acknowledged.  They were just expected.  I was no longer the youngest, the "favored" child.  In a sense, at that point, I was the "only" child.  All of the attention that had previously been directed towards my sisters came onto me.  It created a situation that none of us could handle very well, and my relationship with my parents suffered greatly, often becoming openly hostile.  This lessened slightly after I graduated, though, and pretty much disappeared after my sickness.

Fast forward one more time, to present day.  In some ways, I don't think that the birth order of my siblings and myself matters much any more, because we're all grown adults now.  My parents are, for the most part, done raising us - we're free to live on our own (somewhat, for some of us) and learn from our mistakes (... again, for some of us).  But I do still feel some of the effects of being the youngest child, and I feel them even more as of late than I ever have.  I've really done the best out of my siblings, in terms of my life.  My oldest sister is still terribly irresponsible, and she's struggling to raise her children properly (and failing).  My other sister has become more responsible lately, but only after a decade of irresponsibility and poor decisions.  Whether valid or not, I feel a ton of pressure to be successful - to not only be able to support myself, but to thrive in whatever I choose to do.  I tend to set stupidly high expectations of myself, and I tend to get upset if I don't meet those expectations... and why?  My best guess is that I want to excel at anything, at everything, in order to give my parents some form of reassurance that they did alright in raising me and my sisters.  The point could easily be made that they likely don't need that sort of reassurance, but I don't think that my brain would easily accept that.  Whether valid or not, whether healthy or not, because of my sisters' failures, I put a lot of pressure on myself to be better.

So, in summary, I do feel that birth order has a huge effect on people, and all aspects of their life.  I think that it can be both positive and negative - in the vast majority of my cases, it's turned out to be the latter, but I'm sure there are other points of view that will lean towards the former.  Pendleton's got the blog tomorrow, so thanks for reading my post - I hope it was informative and entertaining.