HAVE YOU EVER noticed that many people in Utah come from especially large families? No, I’m not talking about physical size—I mean sheer number of children: 5, 6, 7 kids. For people with small families, itmust look fun: built-in friends for life and reunions full of food and games.
All true, but as an actual member of a large family, I want to shed light on one significant downside: the plight of Utah’s middle child.
Here’s how it goes: the first couple of kids get all their parents’ attention and resources; they often become overachieving superstars. The last kids – the “babies” – are adored and allowed to do whatever they want since the parents eventually become exhausted and burned out.
But what about the middle child? These poor fools end up receiving all the rules but none of the attention paid to the first two kids. And they face all the neglect but none of the relaxed leniency enjoyed by the last two. Liminal figures, they spend their days in a futile search for parental attention and that last piece of chocolate cake.
Consider some of my experiences as a forgotten Utah middle child. I could sense I was a low priority when I had to sign myself up for little league sports. Wholly untalented and underprepared, I still hoped my parents would come to watch me play. But one of the only times my mom showed up at a baseball game, she watched the action from her station wagon. She explained years later that it was because her fifth pregnancy had given her nausea and diarrhea.
In her memory of that day, she stuck around long enough to see me try to hit the ball at least once before she had to race to the nearest bathroom. From my perspective, she had peeled out of the parking lot in disgust after seeing me strike out once again.
As a middle child you get used to being forgotten… sometimes literally—like when my parents drove away and left me behind at a national park for three hours. At other times it’s more figurative—like the way my parents developed the habit of forgetting about my birthday during my teen years.
One time, my mom invited the local missionaries over for dinner and served them dessert first. Interrupting her hospitality, I pointed out that it was my 16th birthday, and she was serving my cake. Laughing, she said, “Oops! – why don’t we hurry and sing to Kerry?”
I gradually forgot most of my third-child resentments, but all that trauma came rushing back in my mid-20s when my mom admitted that I had been an “accident.”
While I was still trying to process that bombshell, she started reminiscing about how difficult it had been to deal with a surprise, third child. Looking into the distance, she said, “It was almost as if you could tell that you weren’t completely wanted by your parents when you were a new baby. Even when you were in my tumor, you hardly ever moved.”
“What?!” I said. “Did you just say tumor?”
Quickly correcting herself, she said, “Oh, I meant womb – womb – I don’t know where that came from.”
In the subsequent decades, my parents gradually made up for years of benign neglect by sending me $5 checks on my birthday and inviting me to their house to help with computer-related problems.
I got a vivid reminder that birth order remains eternal in a Utah family when I was in my 40s. My dad had distributed a draft of our family history, and this is how he described the arrival of their first child: “Little Stanley was a gift from heaven. From the very start he was so cute – and so easy to care for.”
A few pages later he wrote about my older sister: “Cammy was the cutest baby in the world, and so bright and happy. It was so exciting to have a girl to go along with our little boy.”
How did he describe the arrival of their third child? “Kerry was born in the normal way. He was very colicky; he cried a lot and did not sleep well. We now had three children.”
Reading on, it was a small consolation that my younger brother and sister didn’t get much ink in these pages; they were simply described as “Blessings from above.” Oh well. thee good book says, “the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.” But what about the third? I guess I have my answer.
I do take comfort, nevertheless, that for someone who started life as a cancerous growth, I’ve done ok for myself (held down a job, my kids are fairly normal). How many former tumors/middle children can say that?
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