The Oldest Daughter
Firstborn daughters & granddaughters bearing the family’s weight
*also titled “The Six Things I am Not Handing My Firstborn Daughter Who Also Happens to be a Firstborn Granddaughter.”
I think I always knew that obesity would be a default for me. I watched all the women around me fight with diets, comfort foods, emotional eating (and shopping), thyroid conditions, autoimmune diseases and mental health issues… and I knew that I would spend a portion of my life battling my mind, heart, and body. Or I could learn to love it no matter how it comes and attempt to do my best at however this was going to look.
Boomers (early Gen Xers) taught us to hate our bodies because their mothers hated and struggled with theirs. Culture has taught us some messed up stuff about ourselves. It’s like our mothers and grandmothers never stopped for a moment to actually listen to what was coming out of their mouths about their bodies, our bodies, and all the bodies of the women around them.
It’s a long, toxic lineage of hating what you see in the mirror and handing it to your daughters. I hate it and refused to carry it or hand it to my kids.
You are responsible for what you knowingly and unknowingly pass off to your children. Not every struggle needs to be shared across the generations.
But I am a firstborn daughter and granddaughter, my mom is also a firstborn daughter… and we carry the weight of our familial roles in our bodies all our lives.
The brokenness of my great grandmother, grandmother and mother appear here before me in a way I didn’t recognize when I was young. These 45 years of life are clearly showing the millstones. It’s the baggage none of us oldest daughters wanted but we lug it along anyways because who else in the family is going to take it up and bring it along with us?
No one else in the family seems to feel the same urgency of remembering where we have been and where we are going. I’m not sure they even recognize the patterns. It’s like they don’t have a need for our history, while we daughters spend all our lives with it hung from our necks.
Who is there to tend to the matriarchal line if not the ones wearing the sack cloth and duty?
We show up. We listen as therapist and friend. We engage. We answer the damn texts. We plan all the things. We are the keepers of all that history. We are often the ones who ask for the genealogies and photos.
I can remember sitting at kitchen tables and on front porch swings listening to the threads the women pulled through the family fabric. As a child, I did not understand the weight of it - The burden of oldest daughters carrying the stories.
The burden of oldest daughters is to maintain and protect the family themes even to our own detriment.
In my 40s, I’m finding this firstborn daughter and granddaughter skin is not a good fit. I’ve blown up relationships. Literally took words and imploded the whole damn thing. Boom! I stopped initiating contact with what was really their one-sided information gathering. I’m no longer meeting halfway with my smiles, consent, goodness, and care. I stopped participating in spaces where people never learned how to shut the fuck up.
I’m not showing up in my assumed role anymore not if I have to wear a mask and pretend we are all healthy and ok.
How can I protect my children from being forced into familial-assigned roles that include being forced to take up the family’s rage if I don’t stop the cycle from repeating inside me?
So I imploded my role…And the family has done what families do, they blame the oldest daughter they still have access to… the one still engaged (sorry, mom). It’s an easy cop out. Blaming the firstborn daughters for refusing to carry the family rage.
We remember the histories and we also carry the grudges. We carry the hurts of our mothers and grandmothers like a second skin. And all the bruises, fears, dysfunction, and shame are supposed to be ours to own too.
But I don’t want to be responsible for continuing to swirl the pot. Why is my participation necessary? Is the family unable to be whole without the oldest daughters balancing all the blame?
It’s exhausting - this role.
I’m haunted by the reality of it.
Because my options are limited: continue the cycles and show up or break the cycles and stay home. There is no happy middle choice.
The Six Things I am Not Handing My First-born Daughter Who is Also a Firstborn Granddaughter
The family’s rage (this is both my family’s and my husband’s family’s repressed rage) IYKYK
Expectations to show up and perform - she is not here to make all the wise grownups feel better about their adulting
The role of keeper of family secrets and histories
The burden of balancing emotionally and spiritually immature adults
The role of family barometer… she is not a gauge for family health and wellness
The role of family planner and fixer
What are you refusing to hand to your kids? Or what do you regret passing along?
J.