I’ve been to lunch twice, in the last two weeks, with a fellow middle-child. That’s right, that’s me in the middle up there. The second time, I remembered making what felt like an extremely profound statement, admittedly after a bottle of wine, a French 75, and a dessert Malbec, but I know I teared up. It was so profound (read: I was so drunk) I couldn’t recall what I’d said until yesterday, when a conversation with a friend dragged up the same issues and feelings the wine-fuelled lunch had some weeks before. But resurface it did, and I resolved to blog about it, lest my profundity be forgotten.
The first lunch was a few weeks ago, in a far-flung city, with a far-flung acquaintance, over sushi. We’ve joked before about being a middle-child, given that the circumstances under which we’d met were laughably cliché. For anyone unfamiliar with middle-child syndrome, it’s the propensity for these progeny to often feel neglected or ignored by their parents in favour of the oldest and youngest offspring. If you have a younger or older sibling (or hell forbid, both) then you will have probably experienced the affection parents have for their first-born, the OG, the one who started it all, and the protective attentiveness they feel for the youngest, who is forever the baby. If that sounds familiar or relatable, or you recognise yourself as one of the attention-stealing bookends of the child-group, you’ll probably realise there is another kid there in the middle that no one cares about too.
If being born in the middle is the cause, then the most likely symptom of middle-child syndrome is attention seeking/attention grabbing behaviour. It’s our inner child trying to get noticed, and frankly it creates some pretty cool adults in my humble (and biased) opinion. So back to sushi, where I find myself shoeless and cross-legged at a traditional Japanese table. My lunch date and I met through a mutual love of obnoxiously loud and often offensive music, with a co-morbidity of tattoos, piercings, gothic clothing and niche hairstyles. We’d been accosted on the way to the restaurant by a street fundraiser (clearly youngest children, the lot of them, as they don’t understand being told no) who’d tried to heckle us into stopping by calling us an “outrageous looking couple.” We scampered away but were both secretly pleased that someone had indeed noticed us, and how alternative we were.
To set the scene for you, I was sporting an entirely black, flocked leopard print skirt, over tights and hiker boots, all topped off with a occult-style vampire bat t-shirt and a leather jacket. I had black-out Ray-Bans on, resting on a nose ring and a halo of blue and blonde hair. My partner in crime was wearing a bright green and purple knitted jumper, drop sleeved and adorned with dancing skeletons. Black skinny jeans, slip-on Vans and an absolutely phenomenal mullet completed the ensemble as we strolled, in broad-daylight, and not even Halloween, across the square. We laughed as we ran from the earnest bib-wearing charity boy, that we absolutely did not dress to attract attention as poor damaged middle children! I had commented when he’d (to my horror) selected the traditional seating on the floor as opposed to a nice safe “normal” table and chairs, that he was attention seeking again. Middle-child syndrome does not take a day off. We continued the joking and playful poking at each other’s appearance and how weird we looked and acted. Two gothic crows eating sushi and sipping plum wine. You can always tell when people take a second look, or stare a little too long, because you’re so incongruous, and we could both see in each other, that little thrill of being noticed, of being the centre of attention.
I thought about it the entire drive home. How many of my choices about my music taste, personality, dress-sense and public behaviour are coming from me? And how many are some deeply, deeply subconscious desire to be different, to be seen, to stand-out? I couldn’t tell whether I was a mass of attention-seeking inner-child, or a defiant inner-teenager, who when made to feel like an outcast, embraced the idea and made it their own? I wondered how often I’d been picking the defiant or rebellious “thing” deliberately just because it was the most. Cue an existential crisis about my entire being!
This leads me to the second lunch. I know, I know.. so many lunches, so many friends! What a lucky girl I am! This time I was safely sat at a proper table, and I’d snagged the leather bench side of the table, I was positively giddy with excitement. My friend began to catch me up on some family drama we’d discussed on text earlier that week, and then began to draw comparisons between how her parent’s showed support to her older and younger siblings in a completely different way to how they (didn’t) show it to her. My brain immediately made the connection and began knitting the themes together. She stopped to ask me why I was smiling at her, and I explained I was appraising her equally pierced and tattooed appearance and her defiantly independent approach to the things that she was tackling that week, and found the middle-child energy to be strong. She nodded in violent agreement with me, and said that she felt that was why she was so independent, because she embraced the exile.
So I partially sub-consciously respond to being a middle-child in seeking the attention I missed as a kid, but I could see I also learned to embrace and work with the isolation and loneliness that came with it. I moved out far earlier, and found my own two feet much quicker than my sisters. I am far more self-assured and confident, because my approval was the only one I could reliably gain. I don’t look for a hand to hold when things get difficult, because one was never forthcoming for me when I was younger. I could see it in my floor friend over sushi – he was happy to stand out and was far better equipped to handle attention and curiosity from strangers. He was free to love whatever he wanted because he didn’t need approval. I could see it in my drunk friend, across the wine glasses, as she resolutely handled the family drama and personal mishaps, as she had handled childhood and adolescence alone.
I mentioned earlier that it had made me tear up. I have only really felt deep sympathy for myself as a child a couple of times, and this was one of them. As I was trying to help my friend with the words to summarise her experience I recalled a vivid image of the issue. When I was younger, probably around seven or eight years old, we would often do a day trip to a nearby beach, that had a long promenade. My younger sister would hold my Mum’s hand out front, and behind me, my older sister would hold my step-Dad’s hand.
I walked alone in the middle.
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