Middle Child

 Last week I read an article about gourmet sandwiches, some of which could be purchased at a Philadelphia shop called Middle Child. The dust of controversy in an argument started by Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler on which kids are more successful, first borns or middle children, has yet to be settled by armchair psychologists. That being said, my own scholarly research, consisting of a quick look see via Google, revealed no evidence of benefits conferred by birth order.

Still the idea of naming one's business for my own position in the Wolinsky birth order tickled my fancy. Some of the stereotypes that I'll get to are born out in my own experience, while others strike me as nonsense.

The most important thing to realize is that the family of Henrietta and Gerry Wolinsky was about as dysfunctional as families could get, despite the fact that my mother was under the care of a Viennese psychoanalyst until the woman, whom Mom thought was God, ultimately died.

Mom attributed my brother's facial tics to Dad allowing him to watch too many violent westerns, including Gunsmoke, on our one black and white television. Rather than describing my younger sister as "an unplanned bundle of joy," she called her "an accident," one of Mom's many random acts of cruelty. It disgusts me recalling Mom saying: "I'll get your brother to beat you up," when she felt I was misbehaving. 

Happily I escaped from the chaos of home with Nancy Drew books and didn't miss getting to watch anything on TV except on days when I was home sick from school, and got to watch "My Little Margie" or "I Married Joan." Fortunately, my sister and I later had years of psychotherapy, and enjoy a close and loving relationship, despite our geographic distance.

Both my sister and I agreed many years later that I was definitely nobody's favorite, and that she was tied with my brother for that title with Dad, with my brother being Mom's hands down favorite. Trust me when I tell you that I'm not spinning this to put myself at an advantage, but I was the absolute favorite of my paternal grandparents, especially my grandmother.

That's because by the time I was five or six, I began spending weekends and school vacations at Grandma's house. The only time I can remember my sister staying with the grandparents was the week our apartment in Jackson Heights was besieged with chicken pox. Despite Grandma bribing my sister with an expensive toy piano, my sister, only two at the time, cried frequently because she missed our parents. As for my brother, my grandmother couldn't bear him going through her drawers when he visited, a clear violation of her privacy.

Grandma loved that I loved staying with her, despite her being busy in her role of running Grandpa's medical practice. We always remained close, even after I married my first husband, Jerry, whom she adored. He, by the way, was also a middle child, clear in his view that his older brother was his mother's absolute favorite, always getting the biggest room in her home when we visited. I jokingly referred to him being relegated to his very small old room, "The Ambassador Suite."

Don't ask me where I saw this online, but I noticed talk of some middle child stereotypes, such as being independent and keeping a distance from one's family. Let it be said that I was the only one of the three Wolinsky children who went away to college without even a tad of homesickness -- mostly because I was happy to be out of a dysfunctional home, by then a brick row house in Forest Hills. I got married right out of college, purely coincidentally to a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

Widowed at 39, ten years later, I married a very nice man, a first born much beloved by his parents. He no longer travels, but my streak of independence allows me to explore the world by myself. 

Someday, maybe in another post, we'll explore my aversion to group activities such as board games, mahjongg, canasta or pickle ball, and my love for sculling in a single shell. Despite my being quite the extrovert, I don't know if my need for "space" derives from my being sandwiched between my brother and sister.