It can be easily difficult growing up in a family where there are important age discrepancies between the children.
In my house, I am the oldest of five, but unfortunately, the five of us were not born in any kind of logical span of time.
In fact, I am 20 years older than my youngest sibling. If you want to know how uncomfortable this is… It is incredibly uncomfortable! Recently, I was forced to confront the fact that my mom is a much better parent with each subsequent child. When I was growing up she easily did not care much about what I was doing. She wasn’t concerned about my extracurricular activities, my socialization, or even my indoor air quality. When we were growing up we had a single AC window device that was supposed to cool down the indoor air for our entire house. In the winter season we were lucky if she put a space heater in our bedroom before she closed the door at night. Was she concerned about our respiratory health, indoor comfort, or safety? Not really. This week, she is so concerned with indoor air quality affecting her scarce baby that she is constantly calling the heating and cooling maintenance shop up the street. If they aren’t working on her central heating and cooling system she is asking about air purification devices and HEPA filters. Most recently, I found out that she was so concerned about her child burning himself on her furnace that she was easily going to update the entire furnace. Heaven forbid the child learn a thing or two about consequences and the inherently warm nature of furnaces.