appConfigEntityId

bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

isVideo

articlePageQuery

article

articleSchemaContent

content

hooksArticlePageAdvertisementConfigArticle

hooksArticlePageFloatingButtonConfigArticle

appConfig

filter

json

liveArticle

Rebecca Tomasis

In our family of there are our two boys and our princess in the middle. I say princess because gender stereotyping dictates that we call her that. She is something of a tomboy princess however, if that exists. With two brothers, one older and one younger, it's natural.
As our first and only girl, so far, she has drawers of pink clothes and princess dressing-up clothes. Name a Disney princess and she has the dress, complete with tiara, shoes and bag. Perhaps we did go a little crazy with the whole clothes-for-a-girl thing. But after almost two years of the same blues and greens and browns of little boys clothing, I was longing for some princess pink. 
Most of the time she refuses to wear any of the dresses. The shoes she will wear sometimes; usually at the most inappropriate times. Every day we pick her big brother up from school. It's a walk that involves several flights of stairs, crossing several roads and walking through a park. This is when she insists on wearing the plastic princess shoes with little plastic heels and bows. 
At first I gave in to her and let her wear the shoes. I figured she would realise how uncomfortable they are and she'd never ask again. But she still asks and I still end up carrying her pretty much all the way and there back because she just cannot walk more than a few metres in those ridiculous shoes. So now I have hidden the shoes away and play dumb when she walks through the apartment asking for them. 
When it comes to dressing up, she will usually only wear one of her big brothers' superhero costumes. Fortunately, she has long hair so never gets mistaken for a boy but I usually put a big pink bow in her hair to complement the superhero costume. Not that she cares and I suppose neither should I. 
Her boxes of girls' toys go largely untouched from day to day. The dolls, the ponies, the delicate pink china tea set. She plays with them sometimes when other girls come to visit but she is soon distracted by her brothers' more energetic games with lightsabres and pirate swords. 
She is pretty tough when she wants to be, which is essential growing up with an older brother. 
But she's also pretty sensitive when she wants to be, which helps when you are the only girl between two boys. That I can handle. It's the tantrums that I struggle with. There are certain triggers - getting dressed is one, as is having a bath or shower. But as these are essential daily activities the tantrums are more frequent than anyone in our household would like. Tiredness and hunger are always a trigger and these are easily dealt with. Others, such as choosing the wrong bedtime story from a pile of books, are more complex and unpredictable. As is choosing a pink T-shirt for her instead of a red one. Some are just plain unavoidable.
She is different to how her older brother was at the same age. My biggest concern as the mother of three children is that this is because of her birth order. 
So much has been made of  the 'middle child syndrome' it is hard not to assign that role to her. She is confident and fiercely independent, sometimes scarily so. In familiar public areas she will wander off without so much as a backward glance. When chased and asked where she is going she will calmly reply: 'To the toilet. I can do it by myself.' 
She is generally not very nice to her baby brother, but plenty of siblings go through that when they are the eldest, let alone the middle child. And in fairness, her elder brother isn't always particularly nice to her and he has no middle child syndrome to blame it on. 
I'm not quite sure why the middle child syndrome theory worries me so much. I am an eldest child with all of the characteristics the eldest child is suppose to have and so it is not baggage I am carrying from my own childhood.
Someone said to me the other day as I expressed similar fears: 'I'm a middle child and I turned out all right.'  They were right. One of my own siblings is a middle child and  he also turned out fine, at least up  to now. 
It is something, however, that I am conscious  of as I witness my daughter trying to work out the position she has held since the birth of her baby brother. 
Our eldest has always been silently confident in his position as the first born. It's  almost as if we could throw any number of new siblings at him and he would take them all on board with the same calm. And how could the baby  not feel safe and secure as the youngest? Everyone loves the baby; everyone wants to coo over and tickle them.
The three-year-old in the plastic princess shoes lying face down on the floor of the supermarket screaming because she is not allowed an ice cream and a packet of candies is not quite so approachable or as easy to deal with. 
Her being the only girl helps and as she grows older it is our shared gender that will bring us together as allies against all the males in our house. Together we will fill the house with shoes and books about female empowerment.
For now it is all about balancing the needs of three very different children and it is challenge to provide them all with the quality attention they need regardless of where they are in the birth order. 
And it is not as if anyone every really uses their middle child status to explain what may or may not have gone wrong in their lives. Blaming bad parenting however is a whole other can of worms. 
Rebecca Tomasis is a mother of three and was co-winner last year of the inaugural Proverse Prize for unpublished writers




Middle of nowhere