The Curse of the Eldest Daughter

My grandmother told me I wasn’t allowed to cry.

Through my tears I can see two clear bowls in front of me on the conference table, both brimming with individually packaged mints. Next to me is a colleague who has accompanied me to this meeting as my advocate, and across from us is our boss. I can barely look at him as he reprimands me over an e-mail I sent to a client that he felt had a problematic tone. I just keep pawing tears away as I stare at the mints.

One bowl is labeled, “WINTERGREEN” and the other, “SPEARMINT.” All I can think, as makeup streams down my cheeks, is that this man has put zero forethought into engineering a discussion that is supportive and corrective, yet he has applied the utmost care to engineering a breath-freshening buffet. I imagine my boss’s assistant (she: intelligent, capable, in possession of a whole college diploma) was told to purchase the white Lifesavers in bulk, then was asked to go fetch a label maker. He needed there to be no mystery about which were which. 

My boss assures me that he is “not given to the binary” of firing me over one wrong move. Suddenly I am crying harder, though, because of course he is given to the binary. He loves the binary. The binary is his security blanket! His world is a tidy, black-and-white conservatory, and my fumbled correspondence has grayed the floors. I think he enjoys wielding the binary over me, instructing me how wrong I was and how right he would have been. I suspect he believes one way is always superior. (I bet he’s a wintergreen guy.) 

We arrive at the point of the meeting where there is nothing more to say. He has expressed his displeasure with the finesse of a pileated woodpecker, and I have responded by becoming the antithetical ad for tubular mascara: puffy and red-faced, with flecks of black, waxy makeup pilling in the tributaries of my tears. I need to get up—but I cannot seem to move from the chair. I am absolutely certain of one thing, though: I am not leaving with a fucking mint.

This feeling is new for me. Not the spitefulness toward authority, but having my disdain exposed. I have expressed private displeasure about plenty of my bosses but I have never power-cried in the principal’s office.

I believe the reasons for this anomaly are twofold.

First, I am an eldest daughter, the eldest of all my cousins on both sides of my family. Thus, I have always had an outsized idea of how many eyes are on me at all times. All through my schoolgirl years, I was a master follower of rules, an elite tattler of tales, and an ambitious abider of coloring within the lines. Brandi Carlile, in an interview with NPR’s Rachel Martin said it best, “I’m the eldest daughter, so I … had an inflated sense of self-importance.”

The self-loathing I feel now is enormous when I think about how I must have come across—a pestilence to every teacher, coach, Girl Scout troop leader, or anyone doling out a badge, gold star, or the almighty “A.” The dangling carrot of the award was never more tantalizing, though, than when it was accompanied by the approval of an adult. I had the ambition to achieve, but this was always fed by a pathological need to please whoever was in charge.

In her memoir Awake, author Jen Hatmaker similarly reflects on how being the “first kid, first daughter, first niece, and first granddaughter” in her family made her the self-appointed “teacher, doctor, mom, president, choreographer, director, [and] emcee” during games with her siblings and cousins. Hatmaker was always the boss. “How else can you get the ending you want?” she asks rhetorically.

The inborn belief that I was to assume the role of a leader and remain calm and collected has perhaps always made me feel as though I belonged in the principal’s office, but as a consultant, or a recipient of a shiny certificate, or as a concerned constituent. In middle age, I experienced my first rebuking rodeo.

Usually when admonished, there is a sense of injustice roiling beneath the surface. However, I’ve always known not to become defiant, to raise my voice, use expletives, or be in any way disrespectful. Above all, I was trained not to cry—crying would not get me what I want.

This is the second reason my tear fest in the boss’s office was so odd. Unlike most women I know and love, I am not a crier. When I was four, maybe even five, I had a meltdown at my grandmother’s house. I don’t remember my younger sister being there, so I could have been even younger. I know a transition triggered my tears. Perhaps it was time to go home and I had wanted to stay at my Granny’s. Perhaps I learned my grandparents were going out to eat and I wasn’t invited and would instead be eating Kraft dinner at home while my mother milled about the kitchen. Whatever the indignity, I burst into tears. I am sure I did so explosively, but also comfortably, as I needed my grandma to know I was not in favor of this plan. 

My grandma took no time to investigate the reason for my tears. She swiftly lifted me to the mirror above the mantle in her living room and said, “Look at that ugly face! Look how ugly! No one wants to look at that ugly, crying face!” she continued. “Where did the happy Kendra go? I wanna see her again. Please bring her back!”

I stopped crying.

With the shaming of my little prune face, my grandmother had accomplished exactly what she had set out to do. All crying ceased, not because my sadness had been ameliorated, but because she had shamed me, in the interest of not wanting to manage my tears. 

When I tell my children this story, they gasp at the part when she calls my face “ugly.” It is so unfathomable that their great grandmother, whose doppelganger was Betty White, would have been in her right mind when she said such a thing. My granny was besotted by all three generations of her offspring, and would only have ever referred to us as impossibly gorgeous masterpieces.

But my grandmother was an eldest daughter. She was a highly emotive being but she governed her tears. She raised my mother, also an eldest daughter, who never cried. All three of us as eldest daughters know that sometimes being The Boss is exasperating. Sometimes you just have to say, “Cut that shit out.” Even if it’s to a tiny girl. 

My sister Taryn’s absence from this story is somewhat significant, offering a completely apocryphal and yet altogether useful explanation for the distinction in our emotional constitutions. Taryn was spared from my grandmother’s cry-shaming, and has proceeded accordingly liberated. Taryn is the high priestess of wailing jags, a patron saint of crybabies. For her whole life, she, three years my junior, has found all occasions and venues perfectly fit for a good weepy sesh. My parents were often bewildered by Tearful Taryn, who, when confronted with any predicament or inconvenience, busted open her fire hydrant. I am so jealous of her. The nerve of her to be born second! 

Whereas I, since the dressing down from my granny, became a vulcanized crustacean of a girl. Every time moisture pooled in my tear ducts, I quickly flinched, thinking about my potential ugliness, and the way that my crybaby face could vex others. I grew to become a child who didn’t necessarily ever cry, but who was determined not to be seen crying.

On a recent episode of Mel Robbins’ podcast, psychologist Dr. Mariel Buque said that eldest daughters often learn that denying their own needs is what keeps harmony in the home. Indeed, I believed to inconvenience someone was far worse a sin than to have an inconvenient feeling. In her song “Eldest Daughter,” Taylor Swift writes: “Every eldest daughter was the first lamb to the slaughter/ So we all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire.”

I suppose I was a lamb dressed in wolves’ clothing, but I was forever bleating on the inside. When I hurt myself at recess or was slighted by a friend at a sleepover party, something Pavlovian dammed my tears. I often self-soothed by telling myself I would get to cry when I got home, where I would immediately fling myself onto my bed and soak my baby blanket with pent-up sobs. This habit continued well into my adulthood, when anti-anxiety meds made crying nearly impossible, except under rare cases. Cases such as when my boss drags me down the back steps and drop kicks me into a compost pile for sending a voice-y e-mail to a client. 

When I leave my boss’s office, my colleague who sat through the entire meeting, and has also accompanied me through my whole career at this institution, pulls up a chair for me to sit. He is a good friend who I talk and text with frequently—memes, poems, small parenting victories—and who has seen me get emotional, but never shed actual tears. 

For a moment, I am slightly self-conscious of my ugly crying face. But he then spreads his arms open wide and hugs me in a way that is free of any judgement. “I’m so sorry it went that way,” he says. He listens while I try to process the meeting and the emotions that I never expected to escalate.

I can only imagine if my grandmother had done the same all those years ago. She didn’t feel she had the latitude to offer me a chair and give me a little space to air my cry-baby protestations. She was, perhaps, relying too heavily on the binary. There are opportunities to cry; she decided that particular moment was simply not one of them. She deployed the “ugly” grenade and it jammed up my tear ducts.

My colleague, conversely, is choosing to let me decide. He offers me more than two bowls of mints. He folds his hands and listens. I stand back up and begin to do my best impression of our boss, amplifying all of his idiosyncrasies that have so gravely offended me. I’m an eldest daughter, after all. I know how to play the person in charge. 

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