Middle Children of the world, unite!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Second of four and the only girl and my older brother is super smart and 14 months older. Spent my entire school career with teachers telling me what a genius he was, how he was such a pleasure in class. Sophomore year in high school the English teacher asked him to come in to film a speech he made the year before to show to my class b/c it was such a masterpiece. It was humiliating watching it. The honors biology teacher freshman year asked me why I was in regular level science.

It was not great. I was so upset when he got into the college I really wanted to go to and decided to go, but then still went and graduated with a higher GPA. It's so stupid (who cares about GPA) but at the time I felt a sense of redemption. I was actually not as dumb as everyone led me to believe.

That’s not middle child issues. I don’t know what that was

[Anonymous]

I am the middle of 5 kids and definitely flew under the radar. No one came to my high school graduation. My college graduation was a summer one so I asked my mother, my father had died.

Pictures and videos at the beach I was always swimming alone or two feet away from everyone reading a book.

We all got along but I was definitely the odd one out.

[Anonymous]

Middle child of a large dysfunctional family. I had an extremely abusive upbringing. My parents were verbally and physically abusive and my memories are traumatic. In elementary school I was beaten by my mother and my goal was to not cry because I would have red eyes when I walked into school. When my dad came home my mother would tell lies about me and my dad would beat me, spit on me and scream at me that I was a bad bad person. In my adult life I have surrounded myself with loving people as well as raising some awesome caring humans. Out of all my siblings I ended up the only one who ended up being happy and successful. My upbringing enabled me to be gifted when it comes to sizing people up and making good decisions.
Never underestimate a middle child.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So the great thing about being a middle child in a dysfunctional family is that you fly under the radar! I made friends fairly easily and frequently was out of the house either playing sports or with friends. I got to observe more positive family dynamics and was exposed to how others lived which really had an impact on me in terms of future mates and ways to live life!

I used to say this too, but then when I had kids myself, all the dysfunction came home to roost and I realized the neglect I experienced was just part of the same dysfunction we all dealt with. It is true that I didn't get enmeshed with my parents the same way my siblings did, and that helped me get the distance I needed as an adult. But in the end I still missed out on having a loving or nurturing childhood and it still messed me up.

I have actually lost that ability to make friends easily, too. I discovered that this talent had to do with being a total people pleaser, a skill I learned as a child because my role as the middle child was to be invisible, so I learned to put the needs of others first and lift them up while sacrificing myself. I used this skills to make friends. But as I started unraveling all of this, I stopped people pleasing so much so that I could focus on my own needs that had never been met, and discovered that a lot of my friendships only worked if I was in service to them. When I asked for reciprocity, I was called demanding or needy.

But yeah, for like 15 years I convinced myself that actually being the ignored middle kid had been the thing that saved me from my screwed up family. I was wrong. I'm just screwed up in other ways.