Tales From A Middle Child

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It’s nice being in a big family…sometimes. As Amelia White ‘25 says about her family, “I like them all so much it would be hard to imagine life without them, but sometimes it can make life hard. Especially since I’m the oldest.”  But this article will be from a different point of view: the middle child. We are the middle children in our families; Celia Cahill Farella is the 5th of 7 kids and Josephine Marcucci is the 4th of 9 kids. It is hard sometimes to cooperate with the older and the younger siblings. There are times that we love hanging out with our big families and times, well, not so much. We have fun and not so fun experiences, but this all comes in the package of being in a big family.

Dinner is a great time to connect. We have dinners with our siblings all the time. But, unfortunately, sports and other activities get in the way, so most of the time, weekends are where we really get to connect. So that is why Sunday dinner is so important in our houses. We share about our week and usually there is one topic that we all disagree or agree about and this argument goes through the end of dinner. However, being the middle child in these conversations means your thoughts are not always heard first. Being the middle child is difficult, especially in a big family, and requires patience. Sometimes your little siblings interrupt when you are trying to speak, which is really frustrating. Finally, your parents realize that you are trying to speak. They say their little speech about how it is wrong to interrupt and it sometimes gets frustrating and embarrassing. So you give up!  Sometimes you have to wait to say an idea or earn some attention.

One of the hard things of being a middle child is that it’s  hard to win fights. Since we are in the middle, we are not technically older or younger. Just in the awkward-in-between. Even though we are in the middle, the older kids still treat us like little babies even though we are 11. Fights in our families can be triumphant or a real downer. Take Celia’s recent triumphant fight for example. As you may know in a big family, if you are the middle child you still have a long way to go before getting your own room. In Celia’s case, two of her older siblings are now in college, and the kids left at home fought for months about who gets what room. In the end, Celia got the room she had hoped for and she has it all to herself. This was a big change since she had been sharing a room her whole life. Back to general fights, if you are a middle child then you have to put up a good fight or you will probably lose. And you can’t let your older siblings say the opposite.

Now we will tell you the nice things of being a middle child. We are kind of the older kids and kind of the younger kids. This means that we get to stay up later than the younger ones, but obviously not as long as the older ones. Another thing about being the middle child is that you are old enough to hang out with the older kids sometimes but small enough to be able to take the advantages of a little kid. Sometimes the older kids think you are too small to do the “big kid stuff” or the little kids state that you are too big for some activities. This can leave us in a odd position.

Even though being in a big family can be hard sometimes, we love our siblings a lot, even if it does not seem so obvious at times. This love for our siblings becomes more clear at times like Christmas when we laugh while decorating the Christmas tree. Or those Sunday night dinners where the four-year-old tells a hilarious story about a friend that probably is not true. But our point is that, even though there are some difficulties of being in the middle of a big family, we wouldn’t have it any other way.