Middle Child Syndrome

It’s a well-known fact that middle children are always the ones who end up getting screwed over. The eldest are generally leaders who’ve been taught since birth to be independent and self-reliant. The youngest are usually indulged and allowed immense amounts of freedom which encourages them to become creative and care-free. The middle children? Screwed. Every time. They own the short end of the stick.


Being an education major I’ve taken many silly classes about many silly things and have learned that there are very few famous middle children. There are many famous older children, however, and they tend to fall into political, social, and scientific prestige. Presidents and Nobel Prize winners and stuff. The fame of the youngest more often than not falls under the umbrella of music, literature, and art. Creative crap like that. Famous middle children? Either no one cares enough to do the research or there just aren’t any.

It’s as if having more than two children automatically throws one of them into mediocrity and there’s nothing that can be done about it.

Though, to be fair, middle children do have a pretty significant redeeming quality. A characteristic that is almost solely associated with all things middle. They are great moderators. When you put the word “middle” into your thesaurus it will come up with words like “heart” and “core” and “focal point.” I don’t think that’s a coincidence. OK. I know it’s actually a coincidence but for the sake of this post…

I, if you couldn’t already tell, am a middle child. I have some debatable aspects to my family that make my middle-child status a bit questionable but we’ll put that aside for the moment. I am also a moderator. I get very involved with people’s problems and dilemmas and feel this need, obligation even, to help solve them. The thing is, this being in the middle business can be tricky.

There are times when I am so deep in the middle of someone else’s problem that it somehow becomes my problem. I’m the ear, the shoulder, the staff, the rod, the Doer-of-Things and I end up thinking to myself, “How in the world did you get here? What were you thinking? Can’t you just mind your own business and let people work it out for themselves? Sheesh, woman.”

Anyway, that’s where I am currently. Getting all up in the grills of others. I swear I do it cuz I am a loving, caring, and compassionate person but that all becomes fuzzy and debatable when I get to this point. Oops. Who knew my issues from back home would follow me to Bulgaria? Once a middle-child, always a middle-child.

-Age