Do you read his posts? You’ve got more patience than I do.
Back to the really thoughtful post from CairoCarol. People gravitate to shared interests and backgrounds so I completely agree that it’s only natural that some of us will pay attention to certain things.
My parents who played favorite but my maternal grandparents were worse. My mother is one of six children: one boy and five sisters.
The boy could walk on water from the moment he was born. Never did anything wrong and always did things perfectly. Anything he did was valued, anything any of the girls did was not.
Fast forward to their adult lives. My uncle became a professor of engineering in a good school and became the dean of the college. He had five children, three boys and two girls. All five of his kids graduated in four years or less. The boys went on for grad school; two with PhDs including his oldest son who also became a professor. Because they’re Mormons of my generation the girls didn’t do that sort of thing, so they married guys with grad degrees.
All five sisters married abusive husbands, sex fiends, or simply losers, or some sort of a combination of all three. We got the worst of the deal but the other husbands were not prizes.
Being LDS, they had large families. There are the five of us in my family and I’ve got 24 cousins from the other aunts. So, 29 kids from the girls, 5 from the uncle.
Of the 29, less than half went to college. Not a single person went in four years. No one. Only a couple went to grad school. The oldest son of one family got a PhD after 15 years or so.
Failed marriages. Depression. Financial difficulties. You name it.
The abuse in our family was particularly bad and our lives reflect it. Only three of us graduated from high school and only my oldest sister and I graduated from college. It took both of us years to do so.
The other thing I notice is when one child lines up with the beliefs of the parents where others don’t. My poor second sister is gay which drives my stance Mormon mother insane.
The oldest in the family is still Mormon, but the rest of the kids are not.
That has caused my mother an enormous amount of pain over the years.
When I finally got around to confronting that brother about him raping me (as well as our younger brother and several other boys), I was discussing this with my mother.
She said that all of her kids disappointed her in some way. This older brother by his sexual abuse of younger brothers – and me for leaving the church. In her mind, not only were they equal on some level, but probably mine was worse because my brother could get forgiveness and head off to the Mormon heaven with her, where I wouldn’t be able to.
I’m not suggesting at all that Dangerosa’s family comes anywhere near to what happened in ours. There is no comparison at all.
However, this is why I pay more attention to perceived (or imagined) differences in how kids are treated and how the parent’s values affect their offspring.
