Eldest Daughter Syndrome
and other thoughts on heritage and motherhood
There comes a point when you realize that your mother is a girl, a girl with hopes, unfulfilled dreams, and griefs, and not just your mother.
I'm not sure when I first realized it. Maybe it was the day she shut her hand in the car door. I think I was 6. The back of her hand swelled up like a balloon to an angry purple hue. She sobbed. I don't remember ever seeing my mother cry before that. Our neighbor, a very kind old man, came over to help calm her down while us kids watched in helpless silence. I don’t remember how he got there—if she called him on the home phone or if he heard her from his house next door. Something shifted in how I saw the world that afternoon. My mother, who was able to solve all the problems, was as fragile as we were.
A second shift came when I was in middle school, and my mother cried to me about a personal issue in her life. I tried to help the best I could, but I was only in middle school, and I didn't know much about life at that point. I tried to be the good daughter, though, and bear the family's burdens. Wasn't that my job?
It’s weird to think of your mother as a child, though you know that she must have been at some point. My mother was an eldest daughter, and I see a lot of her in me. We both thrived academically and searched for validation in grades and accolades. We both had periods of turning away from faith. We both struggled in college.
I realize my mother also had a mother, and that's a different kind of strangeness. I hear stories about my grandmother, and how my grandfather watched the three little girls while my grandmother commuted almost two hours to attend nursing grad school in San Francisco in the early 80s, how my devout catholic grandmother tackled her gay and women's studies classes in San Francisco with resolution, how she taught college courses for years. It's hard to see that history in the woman who is my grandmother now.
I see the difficulties in my mother’s relationship with her mother. After all, my mother moved 6 hours away for college and never moved back, then moved across the country, leaving her parents and sisters on the opposite coast. I’m not sure how my grandmother felt about it—she doesn’t often bring it up, and my mother doesn’t talk much about the reasons that led her to move far away for college and never come back.
Maybe my grandmother doesn't talk about it because she did the same thing, and the same feelings are shared, and therefore, can remain unsaid. My grandmother, the eldest daughter, moved from Indiana to California all by herself in her early twenties, while her family stayed in the Midwest. California was where the people were going, and she wanted to see what all the fuss was about. And she was tired of the winter. I have never heard her talk about why she moved by herself, though, why she left while all her family stayed behind and together.
I don’t know all that much about my grandmother’s mother, my great-grandmother. I only met her as a baby. She was also the eldest. She didn't go to college, yet she was a matriarch and sewed every daughter's wedding dress. She made fun punch needle rugs and crocheted, and I am told that I am very similar to her.
In America, we primarily view descent as bilateral—that is to say, we view children as belonging equally to both their mother's family and their father's family. Yet, family names are more patrilineal (descent traced through the father), going primarily from father to son, with women taking first their father's name, then their husband's name. You're more likely to see a father and son with the same name (Jr.) than a mother and daughter (Lorelai and Rory Gilmore notwithstanding).
I am the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter of an eldest daughter of an eldest daughter. We have a picture of the four of us together, the eldest daughters of our families. The feminist in me has always appreciated that my mother and grandmother have emphasized our heritage, so to speak, as eldest daughters. It was something that was recognized, even before internet therapists started talking about the “syndrome.”
Yet, I didn't want to be the eldest growing up. I think I was forced to become self-reliant and care for everyone else. My parents told me once that they were grateful they never needed to do anything for me, like they had to do for my brothers. I was tired of the responsibility and wanted someone to look after me for a change. My imaginary friend was an older brother.
Some scientists suggest that trauma can be passed down through generations, like an unwanted family heirloom. I don’t know that I would call being an eldest daughter inherently traumatic, but there does seem to be a commonality among eldest daughters, and I wonder if it was compounded in my family’s case. As a girl, I wanted to have a firstborn daughter as well. As an adult who has no idea if kids will ever be on the horizon, I don’t think I would want my daughter to have that burden.
I used to think that birth order and who was the eldest didn't matter, but I see the same story in each of my foremothers. My grandmother moved many states away from her family. My mother moved first across the state and then across the country. I haven't distanced myself from my mother, not physically. But I am prone to wander, and I feel it. As sappy as it may seem, I feel like it's in my blood.1
Eldest daughter syndrome has become “a thing” on the internet lately, and I am once again struck by how unoriginal my life is. Tweets2 like “Are you OK or are you the eldest daughter?” abound.
I wish I could just be my own person. I think subconsciously I was trying to reinvent myself when I started introducing myself as Jessi. Still, my last name ties me to my family. I could change it if I wanted to, but I don't know if I ever will. It feels like a betrayal to change my name now.
The individualist westerner in me wants to forge my own destiny, to be my own woman. The thing is, I didn't come from nowhere. I came from my family, and in many ways, I was formed by my family.
Several of my friends have expressed concerns about having children, not wanting to repeat the same cycles with their children. I think some of that fear also comes from losing your identity as a girl and being only seen as a mother (or worse, becoming your mother). I am sympathetic to both fears, and I understand. If I become a parent, I hope things would be different. But even as I think that, I remember my mother telling me that she wanted to be a different mother than her mother was.
But if I ever have a daughter, and if she happens to be the firstborn, I hope she doesn't feel the pressures of being the eldest. Maybe she’ll look at me the same way I look at my mother, and the way my mother looks at her mother. Will she see my mother in me? Will she see me in her? And will she despise that? I hope not.
Along with the blood disorder that came down through my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and mother too. Sharing is caring.
I refuse to call them “posts.”