I Am The Eldest Daughter Of An Eldest Daughter Of An Eldest Daughter
A legacy that taught me to be too good for my own good.
Jacob Mitani | Unsplash The impact of being a firstborn girl can be so influential that many people refer to it as "eldest daughter syndrome,” which sounds like a diagnosis. But it is really a sturdy thread that winds its way around the generations, influencing our personalities, achievements, and unresolved issues that can challenge us as adults. Psychologists have identified some consistent “eldest daughter” repercussions on development and are beginning to examine biological implications as well.
I am the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter of an eldest daughter
Clearing out my mother’s house after her death, I was fascinated by the baby books for the six of us and what they said about our positions in the family.
Mine progresses like a detailed anthropological study. It looks like my mother got up every morning, drank ten cups of coffee, and set to work documenting my every breath.
As a firstborn, I shared the stage with no one. The brilliant spotlights that shone uniquely on me allowed for my parents’ intense study and pride in the many milestones of my unfolding story.
Irish twins
But something happened. I joke that my brother was conceived on the way home from the hospital after my delivery. Do the math.
Guess what happened to my baby book? Absolutely nothing. The curtain fell on the grand story of my infancy.
By the time I was 10, I had 4 younger siblings. I had just turned 13 when the sixth child was born. With the birth of each baby, I became an older, older daughter. Part sister, part mother.
Natalia Lebedinskaia / Shutterstock
Junior mother
This is a common role. My mother was inundated with her many children and turned to me for support. I stepped up with pleasure. At a young age, I learned to be responsible and to take care of business as the second-string quarterback in the intense game of child-rearing.
Early on, I didn’t register the loss of a piece of my childhood or the limits on my identity. Helping was almost like playing. I was the star in the reality version of playing “house.” It had other dividends as well.
My mother sits at the kitchen table savoring her friends, cigarettes, coffee, and a few spare minutes to visit. Eileen, a mother of two, exclaims, “Mary Lou, I don’t know how you do it.” I gallop down the stairs, but stop to hear the answer to the question. “I don’t know what I’d do without Martha,” she replies.
I burst with pride. My mother needs me!
I replayed that praise again and again. I was important. No, I was essential. I didn’t have to be asked or told what to do. There was no one I admired more than my mother, so I craved the continuation of our close relationship and did whatever it took to stay in the warmth of her sun.
But as I got older, I found myself in a bind. I was hooked on my mother’s respect and appreciation, but I also began to register the cost of it. What was a girl to do? I’d been on a steady diet of “special” for my entire life. I assumed that being “good,” taking responsibility, and caretaking were the only ways to get it.
Competence and perfectionism
For me, the emphasis for the eldest daughter was not only on helping but performing competently. I strove to perform with perfection, something that became a burden in adulthood.
I call it a premature independence, in which I insisted I could do things for myself, by myself, even when I couldn’t. This is a recipe for anxiety. Asking for help is at the root of learning so many things, but as an eldest girl, I thought it undermined my basic strengths.
Making mistakes is the foundation of progress. Yet I was intolerant of myself at even the slightest screw up. Years later, in my psychotherapy practice with women who struggled with perfectionism, I wasn’t surprised that eldest daughters were overrepresented. Even when they were very successful, they often felt paralyzed by the prospect of failing.
Too independent
My mother was talking with her friends, everyone complaining about their rotten kids, when my mother interjected, “Oh, I never have to worry about Martha. She can always take care of herself.”
By the time I was 14, I began to chafe at the expectations and the responsibilities. When my parents’ sixth child was born, and I was out with her, I got compliments on my “cute baby.” I felt proud and resentful.
Until then, I had obeyed all the rules. I was “no trouble.” I was the best behaved of all of my friends. But petty thievery, smoking, and drinking began looking better and better. Speeding in convertibles with older boys I barely knew, and constantly lying, just for the heck of it, seemed so natural.
My excellent grades hit the skids. I was still very helpful with the siblings and had no insight into any changes in my behavior.
Within the span of two weeks, my friends and I were arrested for shoplifting, and I got my report card. I expected yelling and the third degree.
Instead, my parents looked stricken and emotionally expressed how disappointed they were. (“Oh, just kill me now!”) I would have gone with hitting and banishment, but they made me come up with my own punishment.
I grounded myself forever, which I realized was more severe than what they would have given me. Disappointing my parents was like having to abdicate the throne. It was an excellent way to internalize guilt.
Two weeks later, my mother sat on my bed crying. My mother didn’t cry. I saw the report card in her hand. It documented a D average, and I felt like slime.
“I’m so worried about your future.”
My future? I’d never thought about my future.
“Martha, you are so smart. What do you want for your life?”
“Well, I guess I’ll go to college like you and get married. Have kids.”
“No, things are different now. You can do so many things.”
“Whatever…” I shrugged.
She signed my report card. I think she decided right then and there that perhaps she did have to worry about me.
The next day, she insisted to the nuns that they transfer me out of my friends’ classes and place me on the track with the nerdy, smart girls. I was furious with her. But then I began to register twitches when the nerdy, smart girls said really interesting things.
My grades rebounded, but not because it made my mother happy. They were mine.
I think she understood, almost in an instant, that having a kid whom you didn’t think you had to worry about was not necessarily a good thing.
My mother instituted a significant “course correction.” I often wonder, in the complex dynamics between parents and children, if I was asking for attention when I began acting out. Did any of this relate to her also being an eldest daughter?
Our mothers bring to us what their mothers brought to them
My mother’s investment in my achievement was tied up in her own development as an eldest daughter. She automatically cared for her three younger siblings. She was an ace in school and had tons of friends.
But her mother found housekeeping and child-rearing overwhelming. My mother began to pick up the slack. What began as enthusiastic helping out expanded over time and became an expectation.
By the age of 15, she planned, shopped, cooked, served, and cleaned up a full dinner every night. Her sister took ballet lessons and didn’t lift a finger.
Her family could have easily afforded a housekeeper. But she figured if she could do it, she should do it. The fact that she was valued for her selflessness eroded the natural self-centeredness we all need as we grow up.
Decades later, when she had her own family and we spent part of the summer in a cottage at my grandparents ’, she immediately slipped into her old role. She fed us first, then served dinner to my grandparents in the “big house.”
One night, I mentioned that she didn’t seem to be having a good “vacation.” She glowered at me and seethed, “This is many things, but it is definitely NOT a vacation!”
It was only then that I understood something important about her. She could barely admit it to herself, but an uncle had once mentioned that he always thought she would go to medical school. It went right over my head.
It was something her father heartily endorsed, and her mother gave a bone-chilling silence. So, in a compromise of sorts, she majored in Nutrition, graduated summa cum laude, hated her first job, married, and, like a good Catholic woman, produced a lot of kids, probably more than she wanted.
Our futures
When I, as her oldest child, grew up, my mother didn’t just want me to do well. She needed it. Sometimes I felt like her “do-over.”
When I announced my engagement in my junior year of college, she was alarmed and exclaimed, “What about school?”
When my first job out of college was working with adolescent druggies and living with them in a rundown group home in the middle of nowhere for pitiful money, she asked urgently, “But what about your future?”
When I was two years into my doctoral program and gave the good news of my pregnancy, she blurted out, “But what about school?”
Course corrections
As she saw that my future was assured, our relationship changed. I became uncertain. Motherhood did not come easily to me. I asked more questions and needed more support from her with my one child than I did when I was fifteen and had five of them to care for.
After a period of restlessness, my mother began to paint. It wasn’t a hobby. It was a vocation, a passion. And then an occupation.
She always had a paintbrush in one hand and a smudge on her face. It was who she was. As each of her children moved out, she claimed our bedrooms as more studio space. A metaphor, I think.
As she sensed my own restlessness, she tried to interest me in creative quests. I had no interest in following in her footsteps. I had absolutely no talent and no interest in learning anything new.
She was delighted when I began to write, but that didn’t matter. Just as she didn’t become an artist for her mother, I didn’t write for mine. It wasn’t until I abandoned the need to please her that I began to please myself.
Children are born into all kinds of contexts that shape their development. Being the oldest daughter made me independent and responsible. It made me stretch to meet my parents’ high expectations.
It made me bossy and full of myself when dealing with my siblings. But I had only two words for my achievement — perfection and failure.
Being born as the oldest daughter created predictable paths for my development. But those paths can widen or narrow with the events that intervene. This is so critical in the lives of women.
I could have easily remained the angry, low-expectation, trouble-making kid. But my “eldest daughter” mother reached back into her interactions with her “eldest child” mother and took a sharp turn with me. It wasn’t until she let go of only being someone's mother and someone else’s daughter that she claimed herself.
Eldest daughters enter the world with an appealing route to being celebrated and loved. But it is only in the context of their eldest daughter's mothers that they see their identities as determined by more than just birth order.
A wrinkled photo has center stage on my desk. My mother sits back in her chair, beaming as she watches something in front of her. She is at my old high school, where I have been invited to do a reading. I must have said something funny because she is on the cusp of laughter. She seems to savor each word.
My mother is no longer happy about me. She is happy for me. That difference sustains me, as now I bear the heavy burden of missing her.
Martha Manning, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and writer. She has published five books, including Undercurrents and Chasing Grace. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reader's Digest, Psychotherapy Networker, Ladies Home Journal, Harper's Bazaar, and has written 400 stories for Medium. She has been featured in People magazine and USA Today. With Mike Wallace and William Styron, she was featured in the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary, Dead Blue.
