I grew up the middle child of three and I was known as “the communicator.” My brother was four years older than me. My sister was five years younger. My brother passed away more than a decade ago and my sister vanished into a world of drugs.
We three were the children of the same parents, but not really. Matt and I had a lot of similarities, but our personalities could hardly have been more different.
We do not create the children we dream of, if indeed we dream of children — and not all of us do. They are not those little chips off our personal blocks. We learn to understand them, eventually — or at least mostly — but it’s remarkable how different we are from our kids.
My mother was a hands on person. She painted, sewed. She was athletic. She loved books, but she loved the outdoors more. Horses and ice skates and bob-sledding. All I wanted to do was read. I could not hook a rug or knit to save my life.
The single thing my siblings and I all shared was a basic failure to understand numbers. We made them work, somehow, but we weren’t kids who had that “instant grasp” of numbers as a language. We suffered through arithmetic and were nearly undone by geometry … only to be buried under trigonometry and algebra. It’s a pity. I actually loved science … until it got to the numbers part. Then I sank like a stone.
So we were three kids from the same two parents with personalities entirely different from each other. My sister seemed like a kid who dropped into the cabbage patch by the stork. My brother was merely different.
1952
We always say “Oh, we all had the same parents,” but we didn’t. Our parents were different. The oldest sibling had the youngest “what are we doing with this kid?” parents. The youngest kid had the most mature parents. By the time they made it to the littlest kid, they had parenting basics down. They had eased up a lot on restrictions. I always thought if my mother had given me the freedom my sister automatically got and didn’t appreciate, life would have been grand.
I told her that, shortly before she died.
“Well,” she said. “Parents have to grow up too.”
That isn’t something we get until we have our own children or have other experience with children in “parenting” ways. That’s when you look back and say “Oh. I see. Now it makes sense.”
One of my bosses used to say, “Girls grow up to be women. Little boys grow up to be little boys…” And he was right. Look at almost any man, and you can see the boy glinting in his eyes and his grin. Look at any woman and you see her mother.
These are, btw, great photos. I love family photos…
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True enough. I’ve never been for trying to make the sexes the same … just to give them the same opportunities.
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I wonder if we ever truly grow up.
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I don’t know about growing up, but we definitely got old. Is that the same thing?
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I’m going to remember your mother’s come back “Parents have to grow up too” if challenged about my parenting skills by our children.
Leslie
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It was right on the money, too. My mother learned a lot between one child and the next. I stopped at one, so who knows what I might have learned?
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I know I learned a lot from each one of mine.
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I think the hardest part is realizing that kids have stuff we need to learn, too. Unless you want to stay frozen in whatever time you come from, you need to not only tell them, but also listen 🙂
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It’s helpful to look at life with fresh eyes.
Leslie
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Your Mom got it right – parents have to grow up just as much as their kids (usually) 😉
You’d think that after billions of parents raising kids for more than 10,000 years SOMEBODY could have written down all you need to know (or at least the basics) about the right and wrong way to bring up kids, huh?
love
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They write it down, but the world is never the same from one generation to next. Hell, even a decade makes a huge difference in how the world works. We learn many truths that aren’t true soon thereafter.
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I recall the 60’s child guru Dr Spock’s son died by suicide so we should probably take what we read with a large grain of salt…. but still…. haven’t we learned ANYTHING we can pass on to our kids as to how to raise a good’un in all this time?
love
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Mostly, it’s common sense. The problem is that sense is not common and probably never was.
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Ooohhhh you got THAT dead right! 😉
love
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I LOVE seeing these old photographs..They are so telling. You were adorable. Your brother was a cutie as well. I’m ready for more stories.oxox
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Most of my childhood stories were not very happy. My father was kind of awful and we didn’t really enjoy life until we were out of the house — which for Matthew and I was very young. Both of us were gone before we were 17.
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Sorry..Hope your happy life now compensates.. better than the other way around, I would think.
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