I’m the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter, going back eight generations, and now I’m raising one. If my own family has taught me anything, it’s that this lineage could be the blueprint for something better. My mother would have you know our lineage the minute you meet her.
I am the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter, going eight times back. She is proud of it, this freakish line of vaginas slotting neatly into one another back into time and space, like Russian dolls. I always doubted her assertion that this was true, until an Ancestry.com test allowed me to access the family tree portion of the app, and I counted one, two, three, four… all the way back to eight.
What could this all mean? The eldest daughter trope is known far and wide, mostly only to firstborn daughters. We are parentified young, destined to become the second mother.
We learn to anticipate needs, predict moods; we are the latchkey to the latchkey kids. I am a people pleaser, and sure, I like to be right. Firstborn girls have a light toxicity to them.
These traits make eldest daughters desperate to branch out, and I was no different. I got married young, had kids young. How much of this was by choice, how much by training?
As the eldest daughter, my boundaries are frequently trampled over, yet I am the queen of respecting boundaries. My younger brother is someone who never hides his emotions; you will know his feelings the second they emerge. I am someone who holds them in, cheeks full with unspoken words I can’t seem to swallow, until the inevitable happens and I vomit them out all over you.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
