Zipping Over the Cuckoo’s Nest The last of the five sections that appear in the index has been omitted from the end of the main text. We are no longer talking about drugs. Instead we turn to what might be the only truly non-physical experience in this work: a brief synopsis of her relationship with her father. She concludes with this: “The two of them sat by my bed at night and talked. Some days my father and I were closer than we ever were when he was well. Other days he would wander, look in his drawers for a clean shirt and forget he had children and wives. I was afraid, that he would leave and I would wake one day and find he had gone and been replaced with another man, because there was nothing I could do about it.” She goes on, “I did it,” by which she means she wrote the book. It was released in 1988 to considerable press coverage. This section concludes with the sentence that begins on p. 239, “My father is a sick man.” The title of the book, The Middle, would seem to be more than coincidentally the title of that final section. A middle child typically has nothing special about her, nothing that comes easily or naturally. Many middle children were the subject of the song “Middle Child Syndrome.” This is another way of saying that the middle child stands in for the typical, the average. The problem with being an average child is that the older children don’t trust you. This has to do with “survivor bias.” They remember you after the youngest child is born and they see how the remaining two manage to survive, whereas you don’t. In a family with many children there is a certain amount of competition for their attention and parents often don’t recognize that for the self-sacrificing, self-abnegating self-denial that it is. The younger siblings, having survived without having suffered or sacrificed anything, are thus seen as model citizens and are given a greater share of the parents’ love and attention. The middle child suffers and suffers until it all comes to a head at puberty. What the youngest does is expected, it comes naturally. What the oldest does is a surprise, the product of careful planning. The middle child is always expected to do something surprising. The youngest child can be expected to be the same as every other child. It is the middle child who must be prepared to be different. A middle child thus stands out. The youngest will always be the youngest, and the oldest will always be the oldest, but the middle child has to be different. The Middle is the title of a children’s book of the same name, published in 1970 by Lois Sander. This is the book that first led me to read more about being a middle child. This is the book that brought a term to our attention for which there was a dearth of names before. My children were exposed to it first at the age of two, when they would sing their favorite part of the hymn about them. When I took them to church one Sunday they sang along in unison. I had never taught them that hymn before, and I couldn’t figure out what they were singing. In the car on the way home, on a detour through an intersection near a bakery, I happened upon a sign for the children’s book of the same name. I was looking for it not because of its title but because it was near a place called the Middle School. This coincidence would have been easy enough to overlook if it were not for the fact that I would be talking about it in class a few months later when I wrote an essay for my daughter’s class on my experiences of being a middle child. These same children would soon become my students. We would talk for years about our lives together, how we related to our mothers, brothers and sisters, and eventually about religion. It is the stories of our childhoods that lead to our most salient conclusions about how religion works. In the case of the mother, this is particularly evident in the stories of her relationships with her daughters. We would sometimes argue about religion as the girls sat on the sofa during the week they had after school free in addition to every other Wednesday. When they were younger I would get a good laugh from one of them, perhaps usually the older one. I would be talking about some new and esoteric point of theology and they would call me a fundamentalist or seeker or whatever they might be calling that at the time. Then the older girl would add her own twist to the story, and I would be left trying to decide if I had an argument on my hands. It was as if I had to decide if I would win or not. The way the girls were in those discussions was more fun than if they had simply agreed with me. I would call them fundamentalist and they would call me a fundamentalist. We would then laugh and hug each other. I can remember once in the middle of such a discussion the younger girl, who was maybe eight or nine years old, said to me, “God gave us two choices. If you believe that a loving God lets his only begotten son be crucified for us and then die on the cross, then it is a good thing. We have to believe that because that is what is written.” I would usually pause to take this in and then think about it for a minute. Then I would say to her, “You know that Jesus, the man we’ve been talking about, was just a man. He couldn’t die on the cross. I understand that he died, but he couldn’t die.” I would then begin to talk about how he was taken to heaven but still alive, and he had to return to earth before his second coming. She would reply, “But the Bible says so.” I would then talk about how that was a metaphor, how if something in the Bible were to happen then it would also happen in a manner metaphorical to it. I don’t remember this particular argument ever ending in agreement. In the meantime she would continue to work on the metaphorical part. I would be thinking about her answer, thinking that it wasn’t the fact that the man had died on the cross that was important but that he was dead, and had done something to deserve it. When she would hear me begin to answer her she would stop me mid-sentence by saying something like, “God was just following his plan.” She seemed to think that I was doubting the efficacy of a plan from which a good and loving God did not depart. There was a good reason for that. If I said, “God let Jesus die” then I would be saying that God made a mistake. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that if God were God then he could not have made a mistake. It was my idea, which I suppose came from my studies of the sciences, that a mistake in the universe is a contradiction. A contradiction comes from having two ideas, the reality of which are in contradiction. If there is a contradiction in a family where the parents have two or more children they are not really the parents. They are their own parents. It would be wrong to say that God made a mistake. A mistake is the same as the logical operator not. What I didn’t know at that time was that you can’t have an operator in an argument. This is because of our basic inability to see the future. What I said would be more acceptable to her than what I didn’t say. Her argument followed the same lines. The next step would be for her to ask me why I was a middle child, if God knew what he was doing and God was perfect, then how could there be such a thing as a middle child? She asked this question when she was nine or ten. This is one I am not sure of. I remember her asking it more than once and I seem to think that she might have been saying something about this as far back as I can remember. A lot of my thinking is based on how my parents and my wife talk about me. This is especially true for something like this. I might remember a comment or something that they said about me when I was older that I would talk about with them. If so, then it is possible that this question was asked in grade school, and if so then I am not entirely sure when it occurred. The point of all this is that middle children grow up to tell stories about themselves that their parents don’t see coming and that their siblings and they themselves don’t see coming. Middle children are those children that the other children assume will become teenagers or children, not adults. We are the children that don’t have a clue as to what’s ahead. We know the path in the distance, the path on which we have gone. This is not an argument that other children think about their futures, but it is a thought that only an adult would be able to articulate. When the future is more uncertain than the present then it can be easier to imagine that it is in fact not there at all. * * * Chapter 6: The Middle This chapter is an argument for the middle child as the true child of the family. It argues that the older siblings are like adults, that the youngest is closer to being an adult but that neither of them are as close as the middle child. It argues that middle children are the most independent of all the children, and that it is difficult to argue against them because they aren’t arguing about anything that’s real. Their independence extends to the level of self-awareness and responsibility and they therefore can’t be