Eldest Daughter Thought Experiment

Grief is caustic to those who haven’t experienced it.

I’ve done my neck and my sciatica has raised its head. I have been dealing with terrible headaches and malaise from my body not coping with the weather change. This piece isn’t my greatest, it’s barely even okay, but it’s what I could manage in the pain and finding something to say. There are themes in here that may be upsetting.

I’m the oldest of five kids, which is something I would say has shaped most of my existence. I love my siblings, I left home early to escape it all but I feel like that saved my relationship with them, weirdly. I’ve moved over 30 times in my 36 years of life - when my mother finally settled down in the tiny country town outside of a tiny country town, the wheels fell off. I raised my siblings while trying to finish high school with CFSME and fresh trauma from the course changing incident that happened to me in year 9. It should come as no surprise that I didn’t finish high school, I barely made it out of that town alive, much less with any healthy strategies for my life ahead of me. Through it all, I still have a relationship with my family albeit unorthodox.

Mother’s Day is a strange day for me. The relationship with my mother and I is tenuous, the sort of thing you only really notice if you’re focusing on it. A cobweb collecting dusty memories and then with the wrong gust of wind it’s stuck to your skin, overwhelming you and you must run. I know I wasn’t planned - that much was very clear to me growing up, so I don’t take it personally that the lens we viewed each other was very much shaped around it.

Being the first born is a gamble. I know people who were planned for and their parents simply were overwhelmed by the task of parenthood, people who were unplanned and welcomed into the fold with a second nature. Not everyone can jump two feet in and stick it - and I don’t hold resentment for those who can’t, but it is an irrefutable part of who I am. It was an accident. Be grateful.

I left home at 17. Stuck in a tiny country town of 1500 people, suffocating under the pressure to be the daughter I was supposed to be, torn between who I wanted to be. I don’t think I could have run away faster. I know it wasn’t their fault, I was their first, I was undiagnosed Autistic until 16, battling with terrible mental health, disordered eating, addiction, and a fire deep inside that burned for something more than agriculture and finding a husband. I fled home and into life threateningly abusive partners because I had always just run with the idea that I wasn’t wanted, what isn’t wanted cannot suffer. I didn’t ask to be here, it’s not their fault. I remember once recalling a story of what I went through with a man who groomed me at 18, he was 36, two years younger than my parents. My friend asked, aghast, “where was your mother?!” And I had to say I didn’t know.

In 2024 a sibling came to me, asking about their childhood as I have a good decade on them, and could recall things that parents didn’t want to reveal. We spent the day discussing things, it was the first time I realised I wasn’t alone in feeling so removed, so alien to something everyone seemed to experience normally except for me. A few days after that, we got the call that changed the trajectory of our lives. Mum has a brain tumour. A ripple swept through us, there was a moment where me and the sibling had a blind, irrational panic that being so angry about our childhood manifested it. How do you grieve this while also making room for the fact that this doesn’t undo pain?

She went for surgery a few months after the diagnosis. I watched as my life, our lives, fell apart around it. Grief is caustic to those who haven’t experienced it. You’re treated like a ticking time bomb, handled with kid gloves, people ask how you are but don’t really want to know that you’re terrified and you’re angry and you don’t know where to put these feelings. People stopped checking in, I felt my bids for connection faltering. Trying to explain to people that you cared in the way a daughter cares, but not in the way a daughter with a good secure childhood cared made me felt like a pariah. I love her, she’s my mother, but I know I am the way I am because of her.

This Mother’s Day is a few days after mum’s one year anniversary of her brain surgery. She sent me a text before she went in, apologising for not doing better. They went in to her brain stem, and cut away what they could - but the scar of the surgery lives on in her recovery. “But at least she’s still here” Sure. But how do you explain that to someone whose new normal is not being able to swallow or speak? How do you continue to compartmentalise the grief of a childhood, the grief of an altered adulthood and the grief of a new normal?

It’s not their fault they didn’t know what to do with an undiagnosed child. It’s not their fault that they had no idea what the impacts of a transient life would have on a child. It’s not their fault that poverty followed them. It’s not their fault that these compounded onto a child that already struggled to relate with their peers, grew to struggle with damn near everything else. It’s not their fault that this lead to horrible choices, addiction, mental illness and then these compound on themselves for eternity. It’s not their fault, it’s not my fault.

These days I’m in therapy, I’ve been in and out since I was 15. I’ve managed to move past the feeling of this being very personal and a failing of mine somehow, to somewhere almost apathetic. If I think too much about it I’ll cry. I’m grateful I’m here, grateful I had a roof over my head, grateful I’m still in contact and they’re still alive. I’m grateful for passed down recipes, the way she holds onto strange trinkets and books of mine, and old photo albums. I’m grateful for chocolate Bilbies appearing every Easter, and a calendar of rat pictures every Christmas.

I love her, she’s my mother. But I don’t have to like what I grew up with. Happy Mothers Day.

I write often about the other of being chronically ill, my ten years in the adult industry, the eldest daughter thought experiment and attempts at scraps of poetry and fiction. It would be lovely to have you here <3

~ Z