The Pecking Order

I don't know where it starts. Maybe at birth. The pecking order. The roles we end up playing throughout our lives. I was the last child born in a family of four children.

In my family as well as others the eldest child was expected to lead the others, to be an example. The second child if, God help him/her is born the same sex as the eldest that child will always live in the shadow his predecessor. I was the baby. They don't really expect much from the baby, especially when the baby laughed all the time and developed a special knack in the dispensing of wedgies.

I came from a strangely traditional Chinese family. I say strangely because both parents came from China, both from rural areas, at a fairly young age. They were in their late teens to early twenties. A new land. No sense of real belonging, only a need to assimilate and not draw too much attention to themselves. They were, not fully understanding the culture of their heritage, not fully integrating into Canadian culture either, effectively lost between two worlds.

They started having children right away. Dad didn't really wait the appropriate amount of time before impregnating Mom again. This happened 3x in a row. Siblings Vince, Walter and Eunice were born in consecutive years starting from 1960.

Eunice was the youngest and the only girl for six years of her life. And she REALLY liked it. I was born in 1968. I was a "mistake". There's a different kind of attention paid to girls by the father. There are less expectations, or just expectations in a different realm. More of chastity and familial responsibiltity, a care for the elderly agreement in blood sort.

Growing up in that time, in a fairly affluent neighbourhood, meant instilling the children with the iterated and reiterated idea that study was imperitive to success. Study led to the attainment of money and goods. Money = Goods = Success. As hard as they would study he would make them study harder because of their ethnicity. He convinced them that the world would not view their abilities and aptitudes based on their competence alone. The world would view the slant in their eyes and their general facial features first, relegating them to more subserviant positions based primarily on racial considerations.

I never got "the talk".

Competition became a primary characteristic among my siblings. Dad encouraged them to compete against each other. He'd often pit one sibling against the other, as if it was some morbid test for his love. And they were willing participants. At first they were scholastic competitions, then it trickled down to sports, then within childhood friendships where he would ask some poor unsuspecting neighbourhood kid who that kid liked better, this one or that one?

His own children.

Choose.

Eventually the competition seeped into their adult lives where the test would include how big their house was, in what neighbourhood, what kind of car was each driving, if you had a cottage, how many degrees were under your belt, how many tries it took you to get your driver's license. It was never the quality of your friendships that mattered, it was the quantity and how full your activities schedule was. How busy you were keeping yourself. Idle hands, the devil's playground.

All four of us are very different in personality. Vince is an accountant and it was as if he found some manual explaining how clichéd accountants behaved and he became that; think Eddie Murphy doing the White Guy skit from old Saturday Night Live episodes: uptight super-white guy, stiff, pickle firmly up ass, expressionless and cold. Publicly the prankster, laughing and smiling if he can make a buck off you. Privately silent.

Walter, super athlete and will tell anyone who has ears all about it, tendency toward violence, but is controllable. Funny, but prone to telling the same stories from his "glory years" in high school. Childlike. Was the apple of my eye growing up. Father thought all he would ever amount to was being a blue collar worker in a factory setting. Publicly the joker, privately the monster.

Eunice has been accused by my motherr of having "eyes on her forehead" because she looks down on people. Refuses to drive her car through certain neighbourhoods for fear of being robbed or raped. To her the robbing would probably be worse. Scholastically accomplished. Dreamed of being a professional student. Always publicly appropriate, privately caustic.

I am considered the "black sheep" of the family. Laughed louder than others felt was appropriate. Had a "talk" by my sister about not embarrassing her at her wedding. Feels shame too often. Is working on that. Is the "pot-stirrer" of the family. Truth speaker. Publicly obnoxious, but loving. Privately often unsatisfied.

In common we share the spirit of survival, showmanship, loyalty to our friends, competency, a profound difficulty to rely on others. We all have perfection issues within ourselves and often with others, a generous sprinkling of the gripping fear of looking ridiculous and are painfully aware of what others think of us.

Separately we have our own assigned roles. We all know that if Vince is confronted he will back down and relent, feeling embarrassed by other's outbursts, mostly because his own emotions embarrass himself. We all know that Walter will break something; a door or a heart. Currently he's estranged himself from the entire family. We know Eunice will deflect, spinning the argument in a totally different direction, leading the instigator to a confused state. She will likely try to be the victor at any cost. Myself? I used to cry but don't anymore. Not around them. They took too much away from me. Or I gave too much away at well below manufacturers list prices. After careful examination through therapy of many different varieties, excellent friendships and time I still feel the pull toward shame, but I hope I attack the issues as they are presented. It is my hope.

We still have funny pulls and triggers though.

The other night having cocktails, Jeremy and I were discussing movie going characteristics. I tend to see movies alone for a variety of reasons. He talks during movies, which I admittedly am not crazy about. I find it disruptive to my surroundings and wish not to do that to other people mostly because I don't like hearing whispers and muttering to my left (my good ear). It's louder to me than the movie is. (Apparently a classic ADD characteristic). He then said something about how loud I laughed and didn't I think that was disruptive to others? He meant nothing by this comment. I lost my mind. All the feelings of their attempts to minimise me came to the surface. [Tell her to be quiet. Tell her to be less, less than she is. She's not good enough. We just need to make slight alterations.]

We grow up and think we're grown-ups now. How could we possibly have the same pulls we did when we were kids. These same triggers. Lots of people have commented on the fact that my laugh is approximately 160 decibels (130 is the average pain threshold). But at that moment, maybe because he'd just dumped me I was feeling particularly vulnerable and extremely self-protective. At that exact moment all I felt was you cannot make comments or opine negatively about things a person cannot change. I suppose I could laugh softer. But I don't. And I won't. Anyway, he loved my laugh. I know this. Why did I take it that way? Fucking triggers in our most insecure moments. Will they ever die?

Along with these triggers, we have this innate sense of our duties and responsibilites. Our roles in society.

Eunice is the self-professed, self-imposed "Do-The-Right-Thing" girl. She always brings the appropriate hostess gift, she is highly skilled at small talk, she "presents" well; charming, effusive in the expected parts ie. nearly clawing her eyes out in utter amazement when the neighbouring Rosedale hostess at a dinner function has made, "by hand", ONE course in the evening's meal. She's got her own money and she rarely misses a day using it as a weapon against her husband, threatening to leave because she can "afford" to, taking her overcommitted 3-year-old twins with her, thus abandoning him.

I hate what money does to people. I hate what money did to my family. I want to deal in the currency of people. I want to make people think, to make them feel it's okay to feel what they're feeling. It's honesty, something that this society lacks so often.

Our roles as people are as unique as we as individuals are. There are caretakers, caregivers, nurturers, peace-makers, war-mongers, mother-in-laws (of the icky variety), hosts and hellspawns. To be brave is to take risks, risks out of one's own character. We should strive to do things that don't necessarily make us feel comfortable or come to us as easily as the stuff that was formulated and honed early on. Things that scare us a little... or a lot. It's liberating. I want to experience as much as I can so I can share my experiences with others. We are all linked universally. We've all felt loss. We've all felt the diverse, often debilitating, feelings of pain and suffering. And I hope upon hopes that we've all felt love.

I believe we all have a hidden resolve, a secret special superpower that lurks within all of us. The power that enables us to be most effective and do the most good. Maybe finding it and tapping into it is a goal we should always strive for, otherwise what's the point of living if we've got nothing to fight for. And why fight if we have nothing to believe in.

Seek your battle, but use your heart.