1. Most of your early childhood memories take place on the sidelines of your older sibling’s sports practices, games, and rehearsals – you name it, you were there watching. So much of a youngest kid’s childhood is taken up by being toted around by parents or caregivers to support older siblings. If you were like me, you loved running around with the other little kids during lacrosse tournaments and carrying out mischief together under the bleachers during football games.
2. You will answer to many different names, including both yours and your older siblings’. Parents, teachers, coaches – none of them could ever keep the whole family straight. Being the youngest, they knew all the names by the time you came around and called you each one before correctly identifying you.
3. You had a lot of hand-me-downs growing up, and it was a rare occasion to get anything that was brand new. From winter coats to calculators, whatever it was that you needed, there were a couple at home in the closet already. Your version of “No Fear Shakespeare” was a copy of ‘Hamlet’ with all of the important quotes already highlighted.
4. You’ll never understand the struggles that your siblings had to go through before your parents were too burnt out to be strict. Yeah, you hear stories about the horrors, but you can’t imagine actually living that way. They weren’t allowed to do WHAT?
5. You can even now remember the all too familiar sting of having the door shut in your face when your siblings had friends over. It sometimes seemed like they spent half of the playdate arguing with you and your parents about whether or not you were allowed to hang around them and their friends. The worst was when even Mom agreed that you weren’t invited — watching your siblings bike down the street to hang out with the other neighborhood kids without you was a horror that could only be rectified by a bowl of ice cream and your favorite disney movie on VHS. In hindsight, you totally get it, but at the time, you couldn’t understand what made the bigs kids so much different than you were.
6. You’re used to being picked on by your older siblings. If you were lucky, one or two of them sometimes came in to defend you against the other ones.
7. You’re a little bit too accustomed to not having a say in anything. Growing up in a big family, you’re used to a loud house. What you’re not used to is being the loudest or, really, anyone ever even listening to your voice above the rest. You had to really make a scene for anyone to pay attention. It’s not that they didn’t love you; there was just a lot going on up there, and most of it was more serious than your elementary school life.
8. Your older siblings were constantly making sacrifices to take care of you. Sometimes you even felt bad when they had to call their friends back and cancel plans because they had to babysit you. But definitely not too bad, because you loved any opportunity you had to spend time with your super cool big brothers and sisters.
9. Now that you’re all grown up, you have some pretty awesome best friends that you know you’ll never lose.
If they put up with you for this long, they’re not going anywhere anytime soon.