Second and First

Second and First

I was my mother’s first child and my father’s second.

It sounds like a completely insignificant fact when you say it out loud. A line on a family tree. A technicality.

Except I’m starting to realize it probably shaped a whole lot more of me than I ever gave it credit for.

For my mom, I was the first.

The first pregnancy. The first baby. The first time someone handed her an actual human being and essentially said, “Okay, good luck.”

Every milestone was new. Every fever was probably terrifying. Every decision carried the weight that only first-time parents understand because there was absolutely no evidence yet that the kid would, in fact, survive childhood.

I was the experiment.

Sorry, Mom.

But I was also the one who made her a mother.

There’s something really special about that relationship. Your first child is the person you learn motherhood on. You grow up together in a strange way. The child is becoming a person while the mother is becoming a mother.

And then there was my dad.

I wasn’t his first.

He had done this before.

He already knew babies weren’t quite as breakable as they looked. He had already watched a child grow through stages that my mother was seeing for the very first time. He had a point of comparison, whether anyone consciously acknowledged it or not.

So there I was: simultaneously someone’s first and someone’s second.

And I wonder now what that did to me.

Because there’s something about being the “first” that comes with a certain intensity. Expectations. Attention. Worry. Investment. You are blazing the trail even though you have absolutely no idea there is a trail.

But being someone’s “second” is different.

The novelty isn't quite the same. There is experience in the room already. Someone has done this before. There are stories that existed before you. Relationships that existed before you. A whole chapter of someone you love that you weren't part of.

And maybe that’s where some of my personality started.

I am fiercely independent, but I also want to know I matter.

I’m incredibly comfortable taking charge, but I notice everything.

I can walk into a room and make myself useful almost immediately. Give me a problem and I will organize it, fix it, create a spreadsheet for it, start a committee and probably somehow end up in charge of the committee I didn't want to join in the first place.

But underneath all that competence is a person who has always been extremely aware of relationships.

Where do I fit?

Who needs me?

Am I doing enough?

Did I disappoint someone?

Is everyone okay?

And, perhaps most importantly:

Do you see me?

I don't think those things come from one childhood experience. Human beings are more complicated than that. Our personalities aren't a math equation where you plug in “Mom's first + Dad's second” and out pops an adult woman with control issues and a color-coded calendar.

Although that would certainly save everyone a lot of money on therapy.

But I do think family position matters.

Not just birth order in the traditional sense.

Relationship order.

Whose first were you?

Whose second?

Who had already been a parent?

Who was figuring it out?

What expectations entered the room before you did?

What fears?

What history?

What lessons had already been learned?

I had one parent discovering parenthood through me and another parent bringing his previous experience into parenting me.

Neither one was necessarily better.

Just different.

And I was growing inside the space between those differences.

As I've gotten older — and especially as I've become a parent myself — I understand my parents differently.

Your first child changes you.

There is a version of you before that baby and another version afterward.

By the next child, you're not the same parent anymore. You can't be. You've learned things. You've screwed things up. You've discovered which things you swore you'd never do and then immediately did.

You worry differently.

You love differently — not more or less, but with different experience behind it.

And the child receives that version of you.

Which means none of us actually grow up with exactly the same parents, even when we grow up in the same family.

That realization has given me a lot more compassion for everyone involved.

Including myself.

Maybe some of the parts of me I used to criticize make a little more sense when I look at where I came from.

The hyper-independence.

The need to prove myself.

The instinct to take care of everybody.

The sensitivity hiding underneath a personality that can sometimes be… let's call it assertive.

The desire to belong while simultaneously insisting that I absolutely do not need anybody.

It makes sense.

I was raised as both a beginning and a continuation.

My mother looked at me and saw her first.

My father looked at me and saw his second.

And somewhere between those two perspectives, I became me.

Second and first.

Or first and second.

Depending on who you ask. 😉