This Little Girl

This little girl is me.  The boy-child in the photo is my brother, Hank.  He's just 16 months younger than I am, and his arrival on the planet changed my life in big and small ways.  Isn't that the truth about younger siblings -- for all of us?

People who practice polyamory, and that would include us, sometimes point to the fact that parents can have several children and love all of them.  No one ever suggests that a parent should "get rid" of the older child when a younger sibling is born.  It is, we insist, possible and even commonplace to love a whole gaggle of children, raise them all simultaneously, and not have anyone "lose" in the bargain.  Except in the single-child family, all children are raised in situations where the love they experience is "polyamorous." 

That arguement is always posited from the view of the adults, the parents, loving their various children.  I've never heard anyone ever respond to that particular scenario with what seems to me a natural question -- "Yes, but what about how the children feel about it?"  Today, I am caught up in remembering that little blonde-haired, brown-eyed girl child, and I am awash in the awareness that, for her, the fact that there was another little one to love meant that she lost -- a very great deal. 

If you look closely at that seemingly happy family portrait, you might pay attention to the proxemics.  Notice who is at the center of this grouping.  Notice my mother's slight lean inward toward my father and my baby brother.  Notice me, out on the edge, as far away from my adored father as I can possibly be.  Notice, if you will, the eyes, the not quite smile, the look of questioning and confusion on my little face.  That's a look that has stayed with me all my life ... eyes into many, many cameras over the years asking where I belonged; if I belonged.  Here it is, years later, as I've moved even farther to the edge...

It is no secret to those who read here, that I am an uneasy polyamorist.  I understand it intellectually, and tolerate it with great difficulty in the actual practical realities.  I am, in any gathering of poly folk, the one who is likely to be quiet because, quite honestly, I am torn about how poly works for the greatest majority of people who might be engaged in it at some level.  In my heart of hearts, I will forever be that "big sister" edged out by all those brothers.  No one is ever going to convince me, in the deepest center of my heart, that "more" won't make a great and undeniable change in the way the world is. 

swan