Mean Mothers by Peg Streep

Author:Peg Streep
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

THE MYTH THING: ONCE MORE WITH FEELING

It’s been suggested that the cultural myths and assumptions about siblings—about the bond itself, the importance of birth order, the ubiquity of sibling rivalry, and the like—as well as those pertaining to being an only child may exert as much influence on the way a daughter thinks about herself as does the actual experience of being a sister, being the oldest or youngest, or, for that matter, being an only child. As psychologist and researcher Toni Falco points out, because being an only child is still “non-normative” in our culture, most only children consider growing up without siblings as a psychological disadvantage, even though there is no scientific proof that only children are in fact disadvantaged. She notes that only children who feel this way are likely to attribute whatever problems they experience to their “only” status.

Similarly, as psychologist and psychoanalyst Frits Boer writes, even though there is “very little empirical evidence of a strong effect of birth order on adult personality, the popular belief in its significance is as alive as ever.” He goes on to comment wryly: “In fact, birth order could become a serious competitor of the horoscope.” Women and men who tell their life stories in the framework of birth order—attributing their identities to being “the youngest” or “the oldest,” for example—may not realize that what they are telling isn’t a birth order story at all but an individual one, which “is given meaning in family mythology by being attributed to birth order.”

Family and sibling myths don’t affect just the development of the self during childhood or how that development is understood later in life; they influence how parents—once children themselves—understand their own children as well. An only child will bring her personal and cultural myths to the table as a mother, just as mothers with siblings (and fathers, for that matter) will bring theirs. Without examination, sibling histories along with an individual’s understanding of those histories can work their influence on a mother’s behavior as well. As Susan Scarf Merrell notes in her book The Accidental Bond, each of us has “convictions” about what “position” in a family means, based “on his or her own unique and specific early experiences” so that “A mother who is the older of two daughters may have little sympathy with her younger daughter’s eagerness to trail after her big sister. Without realizing it, she has a more empathetic response to the needs of her child who is in her same sibling position. That mother’s differential empathy, a remnant of her particular sibling experience but now a factor of luck and chance for her two children, will certainly make its mark on the way in which each of those two young women perceives the world.”

But with consciousness and awareness—those essential ingredients often missing from the stories of mean mothers and their daughters—a negative sibling history can become a positive template for the next generation. Louisa worked hard to assure that her daughters had a

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