One of my brothers read an article that touted the predictive power of birth order. Essentially the claim was that people act in particular ways depending on when they became members of a family. Eldest children are a kind of experiment for first time parents who may or may not use the best nurturing skills in the initial trial run. As time goes by and more children arrive their techniques become less tentative and more relaxed. This has a lifetime effect on the behavior of the various siblings that can actually be generalized from one family to another, or so some who study such things believe. Then there are the only children like my husband, Mike, who is everything and everyone all at once in the family experience.
While I seriously doubt that the dynamics of raising a child can be so easily replicated from one family to another, I have found that there are indeed interesting differences from one child to another that appear to share a few commonalities with others that seem to result from birth order or number of children in the family. Then there are the unusual outliers like twins and the not to be eliminated differences between boy and girl babies. In fact, there are so many possible reasons for the kind of people that we ultimately become that adhering to any theory claiming to predict who we will be seems a bit silly, and yet…
As a teacher I was often able to determine which of my students were the eldest in their families and which were the youngest. While it was not always the case, there seemed to be some merit to the idea that first born children tended to feel more pressure to be role models and protectors of their siblings. They sensed that their parents had certain expectations of them that they were almost duty bound to fulfill. There was a seriousness about them that was far less likely to be present in their happy go lucky youngest of the family peers.
Of course we are all individuals who have been raised by individuals. So many factors influence who we are including the makeup of our families. I think of myself as a kind of strange hybrid because I began life inside a very traditional family with a mother and father but before I was even a teenager I lived in a single parent home without a father. For my brothers the impact of this reality was even stronger given that they barely remember having a man around the house. I suspect that the loss of our father was far more important in influencing our development than the order in which we were born. Nonetheless there are indeed traces of birth order generalizations in all three of us.
I have always felt that I was born to be the responsible exemplar for my family. Throughout my lifetime I have believed that it was my duty to watch over my younger brothers and be a helpmate to my mother. That seriousness only grew stronger upon my father’s death. Somehow I thought that I should set aside my silliness and demonstrated that I understood how to be responsible and reliable. It became my way of live without much thought as to why I believed that way. It also made me a person who tried to control anything that seemed to be out of order. It made me an excellent teacher, but perhaps a bit too demanding as person with whom to live from day to day.
I like order in my world which I admit is not always easy to achieve. I do my best to plan ahead, design alternative ways of doing things in an emergency situation. I get up early and stay up late making sure that my family is ready for any eventuality. I have routines that I prefer to follow rather than randomly approaching each day with little thought of what I will do. My personality works quite well in a profession that demands constant attention to even the tiniest details but it can run amok when the confluence of events change the calculus of what I need to do.
I suppose that who I am and how I act is the product of thousands of factors, just as it is with every person. The order of my birth plays only a very small part in the person I have become. Thousands upon thousands of interactions have left their marks on each of us. We are products of cultures, religious beliefs, educational experiences, family dynamics, places where we have lived and even the habits that we either consciously or unconsciously developed.
My husband and his father and I sit down each afternoon just before I prepare dinner. It is an alien concept to me but one that my father-in-law has followed for decades. In those moments we talk about all kinds of things and I realize through those conversations how incredibly different each of our upbringings were. Our perspectives on the world and its people vary and the greatest difference is between me and my father-in-law. I realize as we discuss things that his worldview and mine are products of the totality of our interactions which could not have been more different.
So it is with all of us and therein lie the seeds of discontent with one another. It is impossible to overlay our own wishes on everyone else in the world. If we really understood that simple fact we might be less inclined to attempt to condemn and control ideas from people who are nothing like ourselves. Instead we would realize that the variety that we encounter is not just inevitable, but it is also a good thing. We do not need to be missionaries intent on changing people. If we accept them as they are and earnestly attempt to understand how and why their points of view developed we are far more likely to live in peace with them.
Embracing our diversity is quite logical if we consider how each of us come to be the individuals that we are. It would be foolish to believe that there is some magical way of producing the same traits and ideas in everyone. It would be a terrible thing if all of us became exactly the same. How gray and ugly our landscape would be if all of the colors and differing textures were not there! How lucky we are to bring so many differences to each other! Nobody wants to have oatmeal all of time and sometimes even a control freak like me benefits from throwing all responsibility to the wind and embarking on an unplanned and adventurous day. Celebrate what makes us who we are!
All It Takes Is A Little Love 