And I was the middle child.
The phrase itself always sounds softer than the experience.
Middle child.
Like a personality type. Like a harmless family joke. Like a seat assignment.
But inside our house, being the middle child did not mean being overlooked in the abstract. It meant becoming the control group in an experiment about worth. It meant growing up with two siblings whose desires were treated as signals, while mine were treated as requests that needed to survive scrutiny. It meant learning that fairness and affection are not synonyms. It meant watching the same parents who said no to me with stern moral lessons attached say yes to my siblings so quickly and generously that it was almost elegant.
The hierarchy in our family was never formally stated.
It didn’t need to be.
Children understand ranking long before adults admit that ranking exists.
Marcus was the golden child. The heir. The one whose confidence was nourished, whose plans were funded, whose mistakes were reframed as leadership experiments. If Marcus wanted something, my parents did not ask whether it was practical. They asked what would help him succeed. Even his failures were treated as evidence of ambition.
Olivia, born much later, occupied a different category. She wasn’t expected to achieve in the same aggressive, dynastic way Marcus was. She was adored. Indulged. Protected from disappointment with a level of energy that would have been touching if I hadn’t spent so many years seeing what it looked like by contrast. Her wants arrived wrapped in softness. She didn’t have to argue for things because the whole household moved to anticipate her disappointment before she fully felt it.
And then there was me.
I was useful.
Responsible.
Capable.
Mature.
Those words sound complimentary until you realize how often adults use them to explain why one child can be asked to bear more than the others.
I was the child who could manage.
The child who wouldn’t make a scene.
The child who could handle disappointment.
The child who, because she had learned early how to contain herself, was continually given more reasons to do exactly that.
The inequality in our home was not subtle, though it was polished enough that outsiders could have mistaken it for ordinary family difference.
When Marcus decided he wanted to attend a private boarding school in Connecticut because several sons of my father’s colleagues had gone there and he liked the idea of “building serious connections early,” my parents treated the decision as though he had been accepted into some noble order. There were campus visits. Discussions over dinner. Brochures spread across the breakfast table. Tuition figures reviewed not as obstacles but as investments. Dad called it positioning. Mom called it opportunity. Marcus called it “the obvious move.”
The checks were written.
The trunks were packed.
