High Expectations
Mixed Blessings of Being the Golden Child
I was the golden child in my family. The ninth of eleven children, I won’t pretend that there weren’t other golden children. In a family that large, every role is played by multiple children. But I believed that I was my parents’ favorite, and I think if you asked my siblings, they’d probably agree that I was. Some of them were resentful of that fact, others were a little pitying.
It’s only as I’ve aged that I’ve begun to understand the mixed blessing that comes with the attention and expectation of parents like mine. I’ve come to understand, as well, that some of my siblings, who had much less attention and much lower expectations, ended up with a mixed bag, as well.
My father told me frequently that I could do anything I set my mind to. He encouraged me to learn about computers (he was a computer science professor in the 1980s and had been part of the computer revolution by a couple of decades by then). He knew that I was good at math and science and persistently told me that my interest in writing as a career wasn’t enough for me. I could do so much more than just write fiction. Why would I want to spend my life telling lies when I could become a university professor like he was?
I did, eventually, earn a PhD from Princeton University at the young age of 24 (I began it at age 19, after finishing my B.A. and M.A. two years after I graduated from high school at age 17). I still remember him calling me and saying, “Congratulations, Dr. Ivie.” I’d been married for five years by that point, so I realized that he’d been practicing this speech for a lot longer than that, probably for older siblings who ultimately disappointed him.
When I chose to stop teaching and jump into my dream of being a nationally published writer instead of teaching at a university, he was beyond disappointed. He kept asking me for years afterward if I was ready to go back to teaching. I was only ever convinced he was proud of one essay I wrote, because he bought dozens of copies of that and gave them away to friends. It was a bit of memoir, not fiction, so it seemed the only thing he could be proud of.
Living with my father’s disappointment has been the work of a lifetime. When he’d insist that my work as a mother was “just as important” as anything else, I knew that this was something he’d practiced saying aloud to try to be gracious. He didn’t believe it at all. He had had these grand ideas for me, and I’d almost achieved them.
But as I’ve begun to talk to siblings who weren’t the golden children, for whom my father had no expectations, I’m alternately jealous and sad for them. They were given to understand that graduating high school was, in itself, the pinnacle of what my father expected from them. It was as if he thought certain children were likely to end up in jail and not doing so meant he was pleased. Not that this gained them the kind of shower of approval I got when I finished my PhD.
On the one hand, I am jealous that they got to figure out what they wanted to do in life all by themselves. Since my father had no expectations for their futures, he didn’t try to manipulate them away from what he had decided wasn’t right for them, and toward what he imagined for them. They didn’t carry the weight of achieving perfect scores on tests (something I managed to do multiple times, but seemingly never enough). Even graduating with an M.A at the age of 19 was just a point on a trajectory that I was supposed to achieve. I could never do enough to make him happy.
I suppose that ultimately that last is true for all of us. None of us were ever good enough. But my position in the family was more visible, and it made it difficult for me to even know what it was that I wanted apart from first gaining my father’s approval, and then defying him for the sheer pleasure of the brief moment of self-realization. I’m left wondering if I would have become a writer if he hadn’t so thoroughly tried to manipulate me out of it. I definitely internalized his idea that earning real money was selfish and evil, and have had to fight against that daily if not hourly.
At the same time that I’m filled with jealousy, I’m also filled with sadness at the idea that somehow my father saw other siblings as lesser, that they didn’t ever believe that they were going to be important, that they could change the world, that they mattered on a large scale, that they were expected to do so much more. As I struggle to figure out who I am now, after divorce, after my kids are all grown, after the death of my youngest child, after leaving my lifelong religion, I wonder if it would be so hard if I didn’t have to deal with that voice in my head telling me that I’m still a disappointment, that I was meant to be so much more.
What if I wasn’t meant to be more? What if I’m allowed to be who I am? What if I could be loved for exactly all the messiness and mistakes that I, as a human, bring with me? What if I have no destiny except my own happiness? These are things that I’m trying to figure out at a late age, but maybe it’s not so different than everyone else.