When You Grow Up Too Fast as a Child…

There are two sides to every coin, as the old adage goes.

There are countless benefits to being the oldest child in a family, especially a large family. If you are male or female, it may be all the same. I only know what I know. So, feel free to apply this to yourself, no matter your gender.

Some of the benefits I have seen are vigilance, loyalty, compassion, accountability, discipline, and willingness to sacrifice. Already, you might be thinking…Ah, I see how that could go both ways.

And you would be right.

There are some things about being the oldest girl in a large family that were incredible blessings. These same things became incredible curses in a marriage.

I loved “seeing” everything that needed to be done. I loved being responsible. I loved the little praises I got for doing chores before being asked, and keeping a clean house. I loved knowing how to care for children from infancy, cooking for an army, and knowing how to facilitate games and play time with large groups. I loved serving.

I loved that public speaking and performing made me no more nervous than talking in my house or playing my most recent violin piece for my family. People are people, right?

The positives have gotten me jobs I have enjoyed, helped me as an entrepreneur, and empowered the heck out of me as a mother. I had confidence that many other women wanted as I held infants, bathed them, and dealt with childhood illnesses. These things were simple muscle memory for me.

As an oldest child, you learn early on that you are not an individual. Your joys, gifts, and talents are not just for you…but for the community. That community is your immediate and extended families, your church community, and your town or city.

You learn to love children, care for them, nurture them, and pay attention to all of the pieces of the puzzle that make a life happen. One missing piece could mean life or death, or at the very least a panic attack for you…and I didn’t need any more of those.

You see the chores that need doing, the children who need playing with, all the while doing your own homework, baking cupcakes for one of the sib’s birthdays, and attending your extracurriculars and holding after-school jobs.

You worry….my, do you worry. Your worry because you see things. You see the results of neglect in the friends of your siblings. You recognize pain the eyes of children and adults, alike. You can spot it from a mile away, in their posture as they walk, in the energy of their voice, and in the words they use.

You hear the stories of your mother’s friends…their marriage struggles, their miscarriages, their early menopause, their children’s sicknesses, their challenges with so much to juggle.

You are up to the task of raising a family…but you really arent’ ready for marriage…because you don’t know you are not ready.

You got “boring” really young. You were responsible for not only yourself, but everyone else. You then became responsible for your partner/spouse. Everything they did mattered. The food they ate, the TV they watched, the books they read, the music they listened to. It all mattered.

Because you knew…all too well, what effects those things have on people-especially people who were still in their formative years (which for men, is like…the first 50 years of their lives).

You fall in love with the little helpless boy inside that grown-ass man you are living with.

You hear his sob stories and you see the little boy who was hurt by his parent’s neglect, his having had to work to clothe himself or feed himself, his lack of family connection.

And the dangerous part is, is that you don’t have any context except the one that you have lived. So you believe him.

But you, as the oldest daughter, prevented all of those things-in part-with the aid of your parents (hopefully) in your own family. You cannot imagine how hard it must have been for that little boy inside the grown-ass man…oh, the suffering.

Your grief puts you in full “I’ll-take-care-of-you-and-protect-you-from-all-the-bad-people-in-the-world” mode.

With this “mama bear” switch now fully ON, you enable them, allowing for all kinds of irresponsible and impossible behaviors. They are traumatized, of course. You cannot blame them. It’s their parent’s fault, their boss’s fault, the system’s fault, and my favorite…the-academic-system-that-want-me-to-be-a-girl-and-sit-still-all-day’s fault.

They don’t text or call when they are away from home, at work, or traveling. But that’s okay–

• Because they need space to sort out things
• They are busy making money to provide for you and your kids
• They are men…they cannot do more than one thing at a time
• They struggle with connection because their family failed to teach them about that

It’s not really their fault. But you try to teach them through words and example.

They don’t give gifts at birthday, refuse to acknowledge Valentine’s Day and they HATE Christmas. But that’s okay-

• Because their family struggled financially and they don’t have good memories with holidays
• Because they have poverty mindset and spending money is triggering
• Because their mom wasn’t the supermom you had and didn’t build beautiful traditions into holidays

There are million ways to justify the neglect that ensues when you become the enabler and coddler.

You never-and I mean never-get what you need, nor what you ask for, inside that marriage.

But, you’ve got it under wraps. You hardly need anything anyway. No one notices and you just go through the motions of life, without any of the right words to name what is really happening.

So you just try harder. You pray harder. You love, no matter what.

And…it gets worse, not better.

The patterns we create as children in our relationships are powerful and don’t always serve. Many of mine certainly didn’t serve me. My relationships with my children are what I always dreamt of. But that only happened after the removal of the man who took advantage of my dedication and love for almost 3 decades. My understanding and awareness of the problem brought about the end of that. But it took a long time. Because oldest children don’t just quit. We hold out because the prodigal child came home, right? The husband will come around, right? He will see my worth and love me, right?

Men and women alike, be careful as to what you are bringing into a partnership of any kind. Understand the power of birth order.

And parents, be careful to give your children a childhood. There are forever consequences. Responsibility is important. We all need to feel useful and connected. But, we also need to have space to find meaning in just being us…simply us.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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