by Lauren Randolph
I was the third girl. Not a boy – again. I languished after delivery with my mother for a full week in the hospital – nameless.
As child boy-surrogates, we did a lot of eggshell dancing around dad. At least that’s what I thought for the longest time. It took a pretty good therapist in recent years to point out that it might have been our mother at the center of that dance. And maybe our father was dancing just as hard as we were. His steps must have been at a different frequency because we just didn’t notice.
Our mother is long dead, and dad would have no idea what to do with any questions about the issue, so the truth is likely never to be known.
As a sign of their generation’s values, my parents took amused pride in how “planned” our family was: Four years separating the oldest and youngest with the middle being equidistant between the other two. What they couldn’t control was the sex of the child. I have often wondered whether, if middle sister had been a boy, I would have been conceived at all. That’s somehow made me feel guilty my whole life.
Control was a great way to suppress conflict. We just didn’t have any. That was the family myth. We learned at an early age to repress our anger by watching how mom and dad did it: avoiding it and each other. My mother’s seemingly constant refrain was: If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say it. Or peace at any price. That was another one adopted, according to my uncle, a year into my parents’ marriage. I guess it’s no coincidence that I carry all my tension in my jaw.
I turned my anger inward, but the physical manifestations would out. I sucked my left index finger longer than might have been considered normal, leading to a showcase of buck teeth. (At least there was a fix for that: Orthodontia at age 13.) I bit my nails. Worst of all, I took to scratching mosquito bites. The welts turned into scabs turned into scars. It was impossible not to notice this problem as, during the summer, we rarely changed out of our bathing suits.
But back then one didn’t go to a psychiatrist, so I’m sure my parents never considered that an option for me. Or, more importantly, for themselves.
The oldest among us was the sweet, compassionate one, not that her forgiving partner couldn’t tell some pretty entertaining tales about her completely losing it. Because of my sister’s giving nature, she seemed to bring out the best in everyone, even dad. I think she got some lasting lessons in this regard from mom. Always ask the boy about himself first.
Oldest sister was a lesbian school teacher, a dangerous combination given the prejudices of the day. But after college, when she’d become known as the “family Communist,” she moved to San Francisco so was living in as welcoming a community as could be found. She was smart about that and many other things, which she never seemed to give herself enough credit for.
She worried a lot about money and sex – too little of the former, anxiety about the latter. Through her workaholic’s anonymous group, she came to feel better about her obsessiveness and even developed friendships with likeminded people. She could talk with me about nearly anything (more easily than I could with her) and always made me laugh. She was one of my favorite people. We knew her as Sister No. 1, made famous in the outgoing message she left on dad’s answering machine, a major electronic step forward for him to accept because he, of course, refused to even unwrap the present. It was a matter of perverse pride with him. And real men didn’t type either.
The middle sister, as a teenager, was the “popular” one. Groups of her boy- and girlfriends would come over of a weekday night during the summer. They’d sit around the kitchen table, inviting my mother, who loved them, to join what seemed like an endless debate about what to do that evening. In the end, they mostly just sat there for hours but seemed to have a good time doing something so simple, maybe because they were so comfortable with each other. I remember envying my sister that reliable circle of friends.
Perhaps scared straight by problems in high school and college that caused a lot of family heartache, middle sister became the traditional one, following more closely in the lifestyle footprints of my parents than I thought possible. Once she got married, life seemed on track. She seemed to do everything the right way: She had a child, joined a health club, and acquired a new golden retriever each time one died even though her husband was allergic to dogs. They bought a big house in an expensive part of coastal California and a second house on a lake, reminiscent of the house where we grew up.
Middle sister became known for sending the same Christmas presents year after year, embarrassing us with the message repeated verbatim. Sending pecans, she would remind us how mom had loved them, but we remembered mom for posting her own hand-written poems on our bedroom doors when we came home from boarding school. Modern day technology crossed with online shopping had made this repetition relatively easy to do for the indiscriminating shopper with no time. We really tried to understand.
While middle sister and I were quite close in high school, that changed as we grew older. As an adult, she became wound as tight as a one-dollar bill used to snort cocaine. She was a control freak though she thought I was better at it than she. Maybe that’s why we have this tension between us.
Her indulgences came to include fine wine (limited to one and a half glasses at a sitting), whitened teeth, professionally painted toenails, a pareo to match her swimsuit, and frequent spa days to help her relax. And she was the one who would get the car each time her family bought a new one, older models being recycled to her husband and then her son. I wonder if they resented this or just felt lucky for an updated model or, in the case of her son, even a car at all.
But she always was very generous: She paid for more than her fair share of things when we got together. And she never complained about it. Of course, her husband was a partner at the oldest law firm in the small town where they lived.
I was more like her than I wanted to admit.
I was the youngest. While the oldest had gone from being the most traditional to having a more controversial lifestyle and the middle had gone from being the family rebel to the most traditional, I sailed smoothly right down the middle.
I was the good girl. For the longest time. At heart, though, I think I may have turned out to be the most untraditional of the three.
I acted out later than most. Did things I’m not proud of. I cheated on my husband-to-be (though I didn’t know he would become that at the time) with a Russian man during a graduate school semester abroad in Leningrad. On the back end of our marriage, when I knew it was failing and had made it clear I was leaving, I cheated again with a married man from a Midwestern university who came to town frequently for meetings at my research institute. Trying to live happily ever after with someone I realized I didn’t, and probably never did, love, I left, got divorced, and bought what my friends described as a “tree house.” Several years later I invited a new boyfriend to come live with me.
Long accused by my mother of being “too sensitive,” I was the quietest of the three, too easily discouraged from participating. At the first sign of conflict, I’d shut down.
It was a problem with anger. I know that. Now. It would surface periodically in ways I couldn’t control. I coped by drinking and shopping online, powerful but short-lived opiates that had to be repeated to keep the high going.
I had chosen communications as my profession implicitly to help me work out lifelong difficulties in that regard with family and friends, at work, in general. But after 20 years of servitude to academic research in a community renowned for its inability, or even unwillingness, to communicate, I quit my job in favor of writing what I wanted to write. I had the financial freedom to do so thanks to our family’s genetically encoded preoccupation with “security,” my dad’s and my own.
I took to wearing t-shirts with sayings like “Not all who wander are lost.” I liked that. It gave me permission to do things differently and feel good about it. Even advertise it, which was a new thing for me who had spent her life by intention in the shadows. Plus I just liked the pair of Birkenstocks on the front. They took me gratefully back to my college days in Berkeley.
Whether my sisters and I decided to have children and what form that took described the arc of our lives and pretty much said it all about our relationships with control.
Oldest sister struggled long and hard with whether to have children. She would have had to have artificial insemination. She ultimately chose not to. I remember it was a very painful decision for her. And she was very open about that pain.
Middle sister had one child but wanted to have more. She and her husband went through a limited period of expensive, humiliating, even painful fertility work – I’m sure it was work – and ultimately settled for just the one, admittedly a wonderful boy, to carry on the family genes, if not our family name.
I had no intention of reproducing. I hadn’t had any good role models, nor had I quite figured out how to be a proper parent on my own. Also, oddly, I just seemed to lack the biological clock that so many women cry over. I settled instead for the quiet but, for me, more meaningful, companionship of animals: two aging cats and an even older horse, with whom I fought daily for alpha control. When my disinclination about child bearing became an issue in my marriage, my therapist posed the bottom-line question: If your husband and your horse were both tied to a railroad track with a train coming down the line, which one would you save? The scenario made me smile, but the only answer I could give her did not.
That experience in therapy made me realize I had plenty of fundamental unresolved questions about who I am, what my values are, and what I want. But it was worse than that. I wasn’t sure I even knew what the questions were or what I wanted them to be. Until I made headway on some of those issues, it not only wasn’t fair but potentially downright cruel to bring another person into this world.
For now I’ll think about how I and my sisters ended up being so motivated by control. Or, more importantly, how to get beyond it and let it go.