More evidence for this post: My sister was bugging me via Twitter to post, telling me that it’s been too long. So, I gave in. See? Things haven’t changed at all!

I always seem to end up in the company of eldest children. This seems to have put in place at my birth, because I grew up in a family of eldest children. Both of my parents are eldest children—my father, the oldest of 4, and my mother, the oldest of 3. Even my siblings are eldest children, though I suppose technically my sister is by 6 minutes. The facts being what they are, no one in my family can relate to being the youngest.

I know, I know. Being the oldest stinks. You had all the attention and then had to share it. You were the guinea pig for fascist parents who then, seemingly overnight, turned into pushovers when your younger sibling reached that same age or stage. One man’s unfair is another man’s reparations. (Except you actually wound up with the monetary reparations. You know, when you got more financial aid for college because we existed. Hi, Ben and Sarah!)

Prior to a few years ago, I was familiar with maybe a handful of Disney movies, and that’s including the ones that came out during my lifetime. Being the youngest, I got about as much say as the remote did in what was watched. My siblings were over that stage by the time I was old enough to enjoy it, and neither of my parents were particularly eager to watch mindless, unassertive princesses live happily ever after again. So, instead of growing up watching Snow White get her prince and Bambi’s mom getting shot, I grew up watching Keanu Reeves prevent a bus from blowing up and Tim Curry ruin my life because Stephen King was given a contract instead of a straitjacket.

While frequently putting me in an awkward position in conversations, this never proved to be detrimental in any tangible way until senior year of high school. We were given an assignment that required us to identify allusions to various fairy tales in a story. I had to confess to my teacher that I wasn’t familiar with many of them. She didn’t believe me at first, but once she realized that I was telling the truth, she told me to work with a friend. As it turned out, working with a friend ended up translating into “copy your friend’s answers” because other than references to The Little Mermaid I was pretty much up the creek without a paddle. When resentful indignation hit, I went to my father and informed him that I had to cheat on an assignment because I wasn’t exposed to enough fairy tales as a child. (Okay, so my teacher knew about it, so it was authorized cheating, but throwing an accusation like that at your father lacks a certain pizzazz when you tell him that your teacher okayed it.) Rather than getting the compunctious apology I had imagined, my father responded with, “Yeah, well, I wish I had. Maybe you’d do more work around the house and give me less lip.” At a loss for words, but always ready with a response anyway, I unthinkingly blurted, “Yeah, maybe I would!”

Being the youngest, your greatest blessing and your greatest curse is your cuteness. I don’t know if this is true for age gaps smaller than my siblings’ and mine, but I found that cuteness worked. You see, I had the pout and the hug at the ready, and I fully utilized both to get my way. When I was young, I didn’t grasp the possibilities, usually focusing on getting extra cookies or extra strawberries or staying up for an extra half hour. When I was older, I wasn’t cute. Unfortunately for me, my siblings recognized this early on, and they figured out how to use it to their benefit. I became their secret weapon, and looking back, I’m simultaneously appalled and impressed at how effectively they manipulated me. Whenever they wanted something, they sent in the cute one. My parents knew what they were doing, but so cute was I that it was impossible to refuse. Don’t get me wrong, my siblings always rewarded me for my efforts, but back then all the reward I needed was a hug and a kiss, and I was happy as a clam—a happy chump of a clam.

My siblings weren’t the only ones who manipulated me. My parents did, too. You see, my sister, she’s not a morning person. Actually, she’s just not a waking person. Now, you’re usually fine if you talk to her after about 10, but when she was a teenager, you couldn’t talk to her prior to 3 pm without getting your head ripped off. Whenever we had a function to go to as a family, I somehow always got bamboozled by my parents into volunteering to go into the bear’s cave and wake her up. “Rah Rah,” I’d say while gently rubbing her arm, “Time to wake up!” I’d give her a hug and a kiss while I continued to try to rub her arm to wake her up. Geeeentle, geeeeentle, sweet as pie. Then her eyes would open into a glare and the inevitable “GO AWAY” would be barked out. I was either stock-piled on stubbornness or back-ordered on intelligence as a kid, because not only did I keep at it, usually resulting in a kick to the spleen, but I consistently wound up agreeing to be the family sacrifice when it came time to wake up my sister. You’d think she’d have been more grateful that I didn’t choose to wake her up by urinating on her.

One theme that consistently appears throughout nearly every story of my childhood is, “Girl can be talked into anything.” I can’t begin to count the number of times I was talked into something by my siblings that I would have never done if they hadn’t made it sound like an appealing proposition. Prank the other sibling, sure to result in a pummeling? Okay! Hop into a sleeping bag so one of them can see if they can carry me all the way up the stairs without dropping me? Sure! Putting on ridiculous clothes and posing like an idiot? Perfect! Hop into the dryer and let them shut me in? Sounds like a spinning good time. I’d like to think that those years are behind me, but then my sister had a baby, and in a moment of introspection, whereupon I recalled the many instances of singing and dancing like an idiot and imitating animals and otherwise acting like a drunken fool, I realized that not much has changed. Just the who. Life really has come full cycle. Here’s hoping they at least cleaned out the lint trap.