A poetry project by Maya Goldman

It's a big responsibility to go out into the world first. There have been many moments in my life when I've felt completely lost, blind, or unsure of what my next step should be. I've often wondered if this is a universal feeling among us oldest children.

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When I was tasked with writing an essay about a community I was apart of for my application to the University of Michigan two and a half years ago, I decided to write about the "community of oldest children." In the time since I wrote that essay, I've continued to think about what that community looks like— and whether it actually exists at all. I've bonded with friends and members of my extended family over being an oldest child, but it occurred to me that I don't actually know what being an oldest child looks like or means to them. 

 

This project is a product of that curiosity. It is an exploration into the wide array of sibling experiences, and how it feels for different people in different situations to “go out into the world first.” As an aspiring journalist, I've always found interviewing people to hear their own stories to be the best way to gather information about a topic, so for the first iteration of this project I tried to create a podcast. 

 

The idea for the show was to interview several different people, and edit the audio together to create several episodes about the similarities and differences in people’s experiences as oldest children.  To get started, I interviewed my friend about her experiences growing up with a younger brother-- as a person with only sisters, the interview opened my eyes to the different struggles and excitements brothers can bring. 

 

Like I wrote in my Minor in Writing genre blog post, I've loved interview-based podcasts like "This American Life" since I was in elementary school. To me, a podcast seemed like the only medium that could work for this project. But when I began to actually carry it out, I found myself almost resenting the work. I felt like I was going through the same motions I would go through for any news article I write for The Michigan Daily. I wrote in my reflection that while I love journalism (I wouldn’t spend so much time at The Daily if I didn’t!), honing those skills wasn’t really my goal for this class. Though podcasting might be an easy and effective way for me to accomplish the goals I’d set out for my project, it wouldn’t help me grow much as a writer. So onto the next experiment I went.

 

I knew I wanted to try something more creative for my second experiment, but considering “creative” isn’t a genre, I still had some thinking to do. Inspiration soon struck in an unlikely place (as it often does). During a weekend in Chicago with my family, I picked up a book my uncle had put together of his collected writing over the years. I’d looked through the book many times before, but this time a series of poems caught my attention. My uncle -- coincidentally also an oldest child -- wrote a poem for each of his family members. And in those poems, he'd figured out how to perfectly captured our family members' essences. What if, I began to think, I could encapsulate the experiences of different oldest children through poetry?

 

For my second experiment, I decided to take the sample interview I’d done with my friend for the podcast idea and turn it into a poem. It was more difficult than I anticipated— poetry is hard! Even though I was using my interviewee’s story as a framework, I hadn’t written poetry since freshman year of high school, and I didn’t remember much about the structure of the genre. I thought up my most poetic words and typed them out. It took a great deal of revisions, but that draft later became “Blooming,” which you can see on this website.

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Despite the difficulties of the genre, I became transfixed by poetry. I loved taking my friend’s words and experiences and reinterpreting them from my own lens. It was a way to stay true to the mission I’d set forth for my project and get to explore the more creative side of writing. At my instructor Julie Babcock's suggestion, I read works by Maggie Smith, Marilyn Nelson, and Ross Gay to pick up on some style tips. As I wrote in my blog post, I learned from Oprah to "write in your own speech, allowing its music and sense to speak through you.” I couldn't wait to write more.

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But because of the way Writing 220 is set up, I had to try out another experiment before settling on an idea for my final project. I already felt pretty set on doing a poetry cycle for my final, so I decided to use experiment three as a way to explore a genre I’ve always been interested in and never had the opportunity to explore. I decided to try playwriting.

 

As I wrote in my reflection for Experiment 3, writing a scene for a play was fun! I chose this genre because I wanted to dabble in the purely fictitious, and almost all of my writing nowadays takes the shape of reconfiguring or regurgitating other peoples’ stories. It was refreshing to create my own. and I even found elements of my own experiences pouring out onto the page-- a new way to process what being an oldest child means to me. However, when it came down to it, I decided the poetry series would more adequately meet the goals of my project, so I left playwriting behind and began to think about what my poems would actually look like.

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I interviewed four different people for this final project. The first was a girl with one younger brother, whom she often felt overshadowed her ("Blooming"). The second was a girl whose parents had a fourth daughter when she was already 13 years old ("13, 11, 9, 0"). Next, I interviewed my grandfather, the oldest of two by only 11 months ("Brothers"). Finally, I talked to a girl who is the oldest daughter of a single-mother immigrant from India ("Learning How"). Admittedly, the backgrounds of my subjects were not quite as varied as I originally intended; three were white, two were from upper-middle-class backgrounds, and three were women. The project was far from perfect. However, I still feel I accomplished my main goal, which was to learn about the wide array of experiences other oldest children have.

 

And furthermore, three years after writing my origin piece, I do think I discovered some hint of community among us all. Talking to the other oldest children, I heard about experiences very different from mine: having to participate in the parenting of your sibling, for one. But I also found many common threads, like the idea of being a "guinea pig," the need to set a good example, and the feeling of sometimes being overshadowed by younger siblings. Through this project, my experiences have been validated and my horizons have been expanded-- pretty much exactly what I was going for. 

 

Ultimately, I chose to write about this topic using poetry because of the freedom the genre allows. Each poem in this project is inspired by an interview I conducted with another oldest child, but the details of the poems are not necessarily completely factual; a considerable amount "poetic license" was used. The works produced are my interpretation of these people's experiences: their lived experiences as an oldest child, mixed with mine. My hope is that as you peruse this website, you’ll feel a connection to one of the poems, or think about something you’ve never thought about before-- whether you're an oldest child yourself or just trying to understand the thoughts of someone who is. 

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