#and also I'm presently disowned from my parents etc etc that's what brought this on

[sage-nebula]

Do NOT reblog, or I will delete the post and block you.

There are so many posts on here about “eldest daughter this” and “oldest sibling that” but there are no posts that talk about what it’s like to be the middle sibling when your oldest sibling is a complete and utter fuckup in basically every way.

I’m technically the middle child. I have a sister who’s 8.5 years older than I am, and a (technically step-)brother who’s nine months younger than I am. My brother became my brother when I was six and he was five, so the “step-” determination is really meaningless, but I added it to explain how he could be my brother when he’s only nine months younger than I am. Anyway. I have two siblings, one older and one younger, and so that makes me the middle child, right?

Well, yes . . . but also no. 

As you could surmise by the opening paragraph, my older sister fucked up in basically every conceivable way. I won’t get into her whole life story here because that’s not my story to tell (though believe me, there are doozies in there), but suffice it to say that every single choice she made is one that most parents would disapprove of. All three of my parents certainly did. And so what do you think happened when it came to me? 

I’ll tell you what happened. 

Because my older sister fucked up in every way one could possibly fuck up, there was a fear, I suppose, or a concern that I would, for whatever godforsaken reason, follow in her footsteps even though the two of us could not be more different in terms of attitude, outlook, goals, et cetera. As a result, if I did even the slightest thing wrong, the punishment hammer came down on me with all the might of Thor celebrating a delicious beverage. I failed geometry in junior year of high school due to an undiagnosed learning disability (along with undiagnosed severe depression and an undiagnosed anxiety disorder, all following years of abuse at my biological mother’s hands), and I was put under lockdown for the entire summer. I was not allowed to leave the house except to go to summer school, I was not allowed to talk to or see any of my friends, or play video games, or watch television, or be on the internet, or read, or write fiction, or do basically anything besides the aforementioned summer school and listening to music. To this day, my parents think this was a good decision on their part even though they now know about the learning disability and myriad of mental illnesses. They think it was a good call for them to punish me like they did.

And so you would say, okay, but if they punished you that severely because they didn’t want you to end up a drug-addicted high school dropout like your sister, surely they would level the same punishments against your brother, especially since you two were so close in age! Well, you would think that, but nope!

Instead, when my brother was around seventeen, he got pulled over and arrested for marijuana possession. (I think he was pulled over in the first place for speeding, but I can’t remember.) His punishment was to have his car taken away for six months. That’s it. He still had all of his other privileges, was not punished in any other way, he just could not drive for six months. He got in actual legal trouble, but he was still allowed to have hobbies.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that my brother should have been punished more harshly, per se. I’m only saying there was a stark difference in the way that we were treated that my family refuses to acknowledge or own up to even to this day, and it all comes down to the fact that I was never cut slack in either direction. If I was compared to my older sibling, then the fact that she had screwed up so royally in basically every single way meant that I would be made to stand at attention so I could be yelled at for an hour for failing a math class, and then continue to be berated and insulted for how I was clearly never going to college (I have a master’s now, by the by) because of it over the next few days, and yelled at further for having “nothing to say to myself” in the face of all the lecturing. But if I was compared to my younger sibling, why, then it should be expected that he always gets off easier, because he’s younger than I am and the baby of the extended family and, well, I’m older and more mature, so I can handle it better, anyway. And I mean, I guess, for the record, true; I took my punishment in silence because as a victim of child abuse for basically my entire life I never stood up for myself against my parents back then and always just stayed quiet to try to make punishments worse, whereas he threw fits about having his keys taken away every single day for those six months, but also we have to consider how “mature” one really is if that “maturity” stems from a decade and plus some of child abuse.

Because see, that’s the thing, and what has made me really start thinking about this the past few days. I mentioned it on twitter, but a week ago I got into a fight with my mom (stepmom, the better of the two) over politics that has effectively led to her disowning me, I think, which in turn means that my dad has disowned me as well, I think, because I’m pretty sure he’s going to take her side on this one. I won’t get into the actual subject matter here, but the long and short of it is that she accused me of “attacking” her when I wasn’t, and has since then refused to speak to me, even when I tried to offer an olive branch by texting her that fine, I wouldn’t talk to her about politics, but I still loved her. She left me on Read. So the way I see it, she’s not talking to me until I apologize, and I won’t apologize, so she’ll never talk to me and I’m just effectively disowned, I guess. It’s not exactly the first time I’ve lost a parent, and actually, it’s kind of in the same way as the last time.

Fifteen years ago, I left my abusive biological mother to live with my dad and stepmom. (I’m going to keep using stepmom to keep it clear from here on out, just as I use biological mother, even though I do call my stepmom “mom” and consider her as such.) At first my biological mother kept trying to reach out with her pity party guilt tripping about how lonely she was and how much she needed me and yadda yadda, but in the last phone conversation we had, she called me a traitor for leaving her. Keep in mind, I was 15, and she was abusive to the point where the neighbors could hear every profanity and threat she screamed at me from down the street. They told me this. They also told me they always thought about calling CPS, but they never did, but whatever. The point is, on that last phone conversation, she called me a traitor for leaving her. I told her that I wasn’t. She said that I was. I told her I didn’t have to listen to that. She said I did. I said I didn’t, and hung up the phone. I expected her to call right back to curse me out . . . but she never did.

That was fifteen years ago, and we’ve never spoken since.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to speak to her. Actually, the one time it looked like it might happen (at my sister’s wedding), my Fight or Flight response kicked in when I saw her walking toward me and I bolted. I had a panic attack so bad I felt like I was going to vomit. It’s really embarrassing to admit that, but it’s true. The only time I’ve seen her since was at my nephew’s high school graduation (which is the only graduation she got to attend for anyone directly related to her, since my sister dropped out and she didn’t attend mine), but although we made eye contact I looked away pretty quickly and, again, didn’t speak to her. Again, I don’t want to speak to her, this isn’t me complaining, I’ve not lost a single wink of sleep for the fact that she never reached out again despite how my dad likes to go on and on about how she should have “never stopped trying.” (But also, he never picks up the phone to call me for a chat either, despite always telling me how I should call him, so.)

But I just can’t help but notice the similarity. Once again, I have a mother who is refusing to speak to me because she feels I’ve wronged her in some way, and if I want a relationship, then I have to be the one to reach out (even though I already did, but was left on Read, so she wants me to reach out in a very specific way that she won’t even articulate). This isn’t the first time that she (and my dad) have done this, either. When I studied abroad in London, we got into a fight over something stupid over Skype, and I hung up the call. I was 19/20, so you know, not fully mature, but expected to be. Two weeks of silence passed before I had to call them to apologize, because even though their daughter was in a completely foreign country and, hell, could’ve been dead for all they knew, they wanted to Teach Me A Lesson, with that lesson being that unless I behaved the Right Way, they wouldn’t be there for me. And I guess here we are now, about eleven years later, having come full circle with that.

And you know what? I’m tired of it. 

Because here’s the thing about being the second child when the first child is a fuckup in every way: you are expected to not only not fall into those same pitfalls, but also to excel in every single possible way. Not only in terms of grades or whatever else, but also in terms of emotional maturity and support for the parents. This veers into the abuse I experienced, I know (at least some of it), but you know how I mentioned that my biological mother kept going on and on about how much she needed me and whatnot? This is because instead of treating me like her daughter, I was instead treated like her combo maid-servant-therapist. It was my job to wait on her hand and foot when she was home, whether that was through fetching her coffee or being in charge of the refrigerator remaining operational (this sounds specific because it is; when I was about 13 the refrigerator broke and she yelled at me for a.) not knowing it was going to break and b.) not doing anything to prevent it breaking), but also she laid out all of her problems to me day after day, month after month, year after year. Do you know how many times I had to sit and listen to the “your father ran out on me after 22 years of marriage” speech? And when I finally asked her if she could stop she yelled at me because I clearly let him badmouth her but I wouldn’t let her do the same. (He actually didn’t, and neither did my stepmom. She was the only one remaining bitter.) She “needed” me because I was the emotional pillar on top of which sat her own degrading stability. The second time I told her that I wanted to live with my dad (because I told her to her face that I wanted to switch the custody agreement twice, and got browbeaten down twice, before I finally left in secret and didn’t tell her until I was already at his place), she picked up smoking cigarettes again after having quit smoking while she was hospitalized for undiagnosed diabetes and told me that it was my fault that she was smoking again, because I had stressed her out so badly by telling her that I wanted to leave. And like, one, obviously I wanted to leave, is there any question of why I wanted to leave or why that wouldn’t make me just want to leave more? But also two, the point I’m getting at here is that it was always about her, always about her emotional needs, never about mine. My emotional wellbeing was never a priority in that house. I was always expected to be there for her, that was my entire purpose as her daughter. 

With my dad and stepmom it was obviously different, and in a lot of ways it was better because, god, I hated having to be the recipient of the constant stream of stress and misery from my biological mother. My dad and stepmom had each other, so I never had to hear about their woes for the most part. But at the same time, look at what happened when I failed geometry; instead of looking into seeing if they could get me diagnosed with a learning disability, or maybe actually listening to me when I said I felt “burnt out” and pushing a little harder for me to go to therapy, my dad instead yelled at me for an hour and several days after, insulted me, told me I was never going to succeed, and put me under lockdown for the entire summer, cutting me off from my support network of friends. I came from a background of 15 years of abuse, and one fuckup a year or so later lead not to a reexamination of how I was doing, but instead a severe punishment so that I “wouldn’t do it again.” I couldn’t pass a math class in university and in my final year I finally broke and went to my parents about how I really wasn’t going to graduate college because of it, and they agreed to pay to get me examined for a learning disability which, whoops, looks like I had! And my dad still blames me for waiting for so long to get diagnosed and not telling him sooner, when the last time he found I failed a math class that summer lockdown happened. He still hasn’t put the pieces together between that lockdown and why I didn’t tell him about the math classes I failed in university. Amazing.

My point is, with my dad and my stepmom, it wasn’t so much that they used me as an emotional sponge or pillar, but rather that they were pretty much uninvolved so long as I performed adequately, and was the model daughter they could be Oh So Proud Of, but the moment I slipped, bam! Go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not contact your friends. My emotional needs were still not a priority because it wasn’t about whether or not I was okay, but whether or not it looked like I was doing okay in ways that were quantifiable, such as my grades. And I mean, to be fair, I wasn’t exactly keen on opening up about my feelings at that age and I was a pro at masking how I felt and acting like everything was fine because my biological mother would berate me on the car rides to school each morning to the point of tears, and then would yell at me more about how I better clean myself up because god help me if any teachers saw me crying, which would make them think she was a bad parent and that, too, would be my fault. (Protip: Washing your face with very cold water helps clear away the puffiness around the eyes that can be a tell you’ve been crying.) But even so, again, that puts the responsibility on me to do the Right Thing so that they could be there for me emotionally as my parents, and that is just—

I’m so tired of it, man!

I have had three parents and yet have never had the unconditional love of one. Never. My stepmom once tried telling me that she and my dad would love me unconditionally when I was a teen and she was trying to get me to admit I was a lesbian (funny thing is, even I didn’t know I was gay at the time), and my dad walked through the living room and, not even knowing what we were talking about, was like, “No we won’t.” So that was great. But the thing is this whole thing proves that she was full of it, too. Because they tolerate me being gay (while still trying to set me up with men), but because I won’t apologize to my mom when I haven’t done anything wrong but she feels like I have, she’s giving me the complete and total silent treatment until I do. Because I didn’t perform in the way I’m supposed to, because I wasn’t The Mature One, I’m being cut off. Because it’s my job to be The Mature One, because I was always The Mature One, because I never had any goddamn choice in the matter and the dysfunctional environment I was in when I lived with my biological mother (+ my sister, her baby daddy-now-husband, and their two very young children whom I was often put in charge of despite being in middle school at the time because their parents were often too busy doing drugs and/or sleeping to care for them) required it. Because I had to be Kept In Line so that I wouldn’t end up like my sister, but also it was just me that had to be kept in line despite how close in age my brother and I were. And again, I’m not saying that I wish my brother had also been punished harshly, but more that I wish that, you know, maybe some mercy could have been doled out to me, except it wasn’t, because I had two siblings on either side to be compared to and as a result one toe out of the line resulted in a smiting.

But in the end, it isn’t even really about that. This post isn’t really about how I’m simultaneously the eldest daughter but also the second child. It’s more about the fact that I’ve had three parents and yet have never had the unconditional love of even one, even from the one who said I had it. It’s about how my emotional needs were never a priority for any of the parents in my life. It’s about how I basically had to raise myself and it’s a real goddamn wonder I’m not even more screwed up than I actually am because of it. And it’s also about how I really miss therapy and haven’t been able to go for a long time, and I think this rambling stream of consciousness post proves that I really, really need to find a new therapist so I can go back again, because goddamn.

Anyway, once again, do NOT reblog this or I will delete it and block you, I just needed to get this off my chest, but I need it to stay here. Thank you.