May 1, 2014

What Is Your Birth Order?







To Only Children: Being the oldest child dooms you to the responsibility chip, whether you have no siblings or 7. Until both your parents die, you are being parented by people who have no clue what they are doing.  Their grandparenting skills are nonexistent. Children raise their parents to be grownups. Being outnumbered makes the job more challenging and stimulating, but you are always up to it.

My five brothers are 18 months, 3 years, 7 years, 11 years, and 13 years younger.

Sibling closeness has mattered more to me than to my brothers. I try much harder to keep the family connected. Being both the oldest and the only girl seems central. I was my adult height when my two younger brothers were born; they were only 5 and 7 when I left home for college. I must have seemed a maternal figure to them. In some pictures I look like their young mother.

We did not grow up in the same family. My mother returned to school full-time when my youngest brother  Brian was 5; she started teaching high school when he was 7. The 3 oldest Koch sibs  had a stay-at-homehome mother until we went to college. Brian doesn't remember my mom staying at home full-time. My father retired before Brian finished college.

We have very different perceptions of our parents. The 4 oldest remember our dad as a brilliant intellectual and mathematician; The 2 youngest remember a grail old man who disappeared into Alzheimer's Disease. The three oldest remember our childhood perceptions of my mom as "just a housewife" who never went to college. My younger brothers remember her the way her obituary describes her: "teacher, activist, trailblazer."