Sable Monroe

But I Was Your Child Too

I was about six years old when my mother told me she was going to have a boy.

She was pregnant with my younger brother, and somehow she already knew.

Not medically. Not because of an ultrasound. She just knew.

She told me the baby was going to be a boy, and that her boy was going to be for her.

I remember being confused.

“But I’m your child too.”

She told me it was different.

Apparently, I was for my father.

Her son was going to be hers.

I didn’t have the language at six years old to explain why that bothered me. I didn’t know anything about family systems, favoritism, emotional enmeshment, gender preferences, or dysfunctional parenting.

I just knew something about the arrangement didn’t make sense.

If she was my mother, why wasn’t I already her child?

Why did she need another one for herself?

And why did my belonging to my father somehow diminish my belonging to her?

These were not questions I knew how to articulate.

I was six.

I just knew I had apparently been assigned to somebody else.

The strange thing is that this wasn’t even the first time I had sensed there was a hierarchy in my mother’s heart.

Before my brother was born, I remember crying one day.

My mother asked me what was wrong.

I told her I thought she loved my father more than she loved me.

She told me that wasn’t true.

Of course she did.

What else was she supposed to say?

“Yes, baby. You’ve correctly identified the emotional structure of the household.”

She knew enough to understand that telling a little girl her father mattered more would sound terrible.

But children do not learn relationships from what adults say.

They learn them from what adults repeatedly do.

And whatever I had been watching was enough for a very young version of me to reach a conclusion:

Daddy mattered more.

Then my mother became pregnant and gave me another piece of information.

I belonged to Daddy.

The baby belonged to her.

Looking back, I can see how bizarre that was.

At the time, I was simply confused.

This was before the anger.

Before the contempt.

Before I learned to mentally reduce my mother from an all-powerful authority figure into someone whose judgment I did not respect.

This was before I learned to look at some of her choices and think, That is fucking stupid.

Before all of that came a little girl who still wanted her mother.

That part matters.

Because when people talk about estranged adult children, they sometimes begin the story at the end.

They meet the adult who is angry.

The adult who has stopped calling.

The adult who says harsh things.

The adult who no longer feels obligated to protect the parent’s reputation.

And they think the anger appeared first.

It usually didn’t.

Sometimes confusion came first.

Sometimes longing came first.

Sometimes a child spent years trying to figure out why the relationship everyone told her was supposed to be natural felt so unnatural.

My brother was eventually born.

And yes, he became my mother’s favorite.

That isn’t something I figured out twenty years later in therapy.

It was obvious.

But what interests me now is that the favoritism did not begin when there were two children standing in front of her and she gradually discovered she preferred one.

She had already imagined him differently before he arrived.

He was going to be her boy.

Her child.

The one for her.

That was the role she gave him before she even met him.

And I had already been placed somewhere else.

With my father.

The irony is that my father was not exactly a prize.

My parents’ relationship was violent and dysfunctional. My mother eventually divorced him, and she was right to do so.

But emotionally, men seemed to occupy enormous territory in my mother’s world.

First my father.

Then my stepfather.

Then her son.

The details changed.

The hierarchy did not.

As an adult, I can see that my brother being the favorite was only one chapter in something much older.

My mother was male-centered long before there was a son to center.

My brother simply arrived in a family structure that already had a place waiting for him.

And the part that still fascinates me is how early I noticed.

Children notice more than adults like to believe.

They may not understand what they are seeing.

They may explain it incorrectly.

They may blame themselves.

But they notice.

A child may not know the words emotional hierarchy.

She knows who gets protected.

She knows whose moods control the room.

She knows whose needs become emergencies.

She knows whose pain gets taken seriously.

She knows when somebody else’s relationship with her parent seems to matter more than her own.

And sometimes she asks the simplest question in the world.

“But I’m your child too.”

There was a time when I needed an answer to that.

I wanted to understand why my mother couldn’t be the mother I needed.

I wanted the equation to balance.

I wanted there to be some explanation that would make everything make sense without requiring me to accept the possibility that the person raising me simply did not have what I needed from her.

Eventually, I stopped asking.

That came much later.

I mentally dethroned her.

I stopped treating her opinions as sacred.

I stopped assuming adulthood automatically made her wise.

I looked at the violence, the chaos, the contradictions, the men, the choices, and decided that maybe the person evaluating me wasn’t qualified to determine my worth in the first place.

That protected me.

Contempt came in handy.

But contempt was not where the story started.

The story started with confusion.

With wanting.

With a little girl trying to figure out why her mother needed a child “for herself” when she already had one standing right in front of her.

I understand now what I could not understand then.

My brother becoming the favorite did not create the wound.

He arrived after it had already begun.

And maybe that is one of the hardest things to understand about favoritism in dysfunctional families.

Sometimes the favorite child is not the beginning of the hierarchy.

Sometimes the parent built the hierarchy first.

Then the children were assigned their places.

My brother was hers.

I was apparently my father’s.

At six years old, I knew enough to object.

But I was your child too.