What does it mean to be an eldest daughter in a line of eldest daughters?
I realised fairly recently that I’m the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter and the eldest granddaughter of an eldest granddaughter, four generations of eldest daughters that ends with me. I’m the mother of two sons, their births bookending my Mum’s death in 2015. I’m fascinated by what this could mean, by how those layers of eldest daughter-ness might have shaped my experience of mothering and being mothered, and my Mum’s experience, my Nana’s, my Nan’s. Humans are storytelling animals, we look for patterns, and it feels like there should be some folkloric significance to being the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter of an eldest daughter of an eldest daughter, in the same way as the seventh son of a seventh son is said to be lucky or to possess special powers1. Or it should be the set up for a fairy tale - although usually it’s the youngest child rather than the eldest who gets the call to adventure2.
Instead, type “eldest daughter” into Google and the first thing that comes up is eldest daughter syndrome. In a viral TikTok video earlier this year, licensed marriage and family therapist Kati Morton described eldest daughter syndrome as a “term coined to describe the unique pressures and responsibilities placed on to the oldest daughter of the family”. And, basically, eldest daughters everywhere felts incredibly seen and validated. This Guardian article from May 2024 provides a good summary of the “symptoms”, although it points out that eldest daughter syndrome is not an official mental health diagnosis. I definitely recognise many of the listed signs, including being a people pleaser and worrier, feeling overly responsible for everyone else’s wellbeing, and finding it hard to hold and maintain boundaries. I can see aspects of my mother and grandmother there too, but I can also see parts of my eldest son.
Maybe it’s a bit like astrology. I can read the horoscope for my sun sign and recognise some of my personality traits in it, but I can also read the horoscopes for my rising or moon signs, or to be honest any of the 12 star signs, and find elements of myself reflected back to me. There are truths to find everywhere. Maybe some of the signs of eldest daughter syndrome reflect parts of the broader experience of being an eldest child, whatever your sex/ gender, or elements of what it means to be a daughter regardless of birth order. There’s also different kinds of eldest daughter as well: a first born child who is female VS the eldest female child who might have multiple older male siblings. When we look beyond the nuclear family and add blended families, or found families to the mix, birth order ands its potential impact on shaping your identity becomes even more conditional and subjective, open to debate. Who gets to decide who is an eldest daughter?
Mythical creatures, eggs and time travel
The way in which my Mum was mothered will have shaped the way she mothered me. Her experience of being an eldest daughter must surely have influenced her mothering, and had a ripple effect on my experience of being an eldest daughter. There’s also the direct physical connection between us as biological mother and child. Beyond the obvious (a fertilised egg successfully implanted itself in the lining of my mother’s womb and 40 weeks or so later I was born), there’s something interesting in how and when that egg was formed. Oogenesis is the process through which egg cells (oocytes) develop in the ovaries. It’s generally accepted that all the eggs a woman will ever have are present in her ovaries before birth (although some recent research suggests that it’s possible that new oocytes could continue to form after birth or even in adulthood3). So 50% of my genetic material, the potential of me, existed within my mother’s unborn body when my grandmother was pregnant with her in 1949. Go back another generation and 50% of my mother’s genetic material existed in my grandmother’s unborn body when my great-grandmother was pregnant with her in 1921. To me this feels like a kind of embodied and unconscious form of time travel. We’re stacked together like a set of Russian dolls. In a way, parts of what would one day become me existed physically (if microscopically) in the world 30 years before I was born.
Oogenesis reaches back through time to the older generation. Microchimerism reaches backwards and forward in time simultaneously. I first came across this concept via the excellent Matrescence by Lucy Jones. As she explains:
“During pregnancy, cells are exchanged between the mother and the foetus via the placenta. When the baby is born, some of those cells remain intact in the mother’s body. For decades. Perhaps for ever.”
And cells from the mother also remain in the child’s body. So some of Mum’s cells, her DNA, may still exist within my body, 9 years after her death, and some of my cells, my DNA, might have existed within her body and died when she did. Some of my cells are likely to exist within my sons’ bodies, and some of theirs within mine. It’s another form of physical connection between a mother and child at a microscopic, cellular level, one that endures beyond the death of one of them.
It’s also possible that this link could stretch further forward in time, over more than one generation. Recent research has identified cells from the maternal grandmother present in foetal cord blood in a small sample4. My Nana died in 2009 and my Nan in 1985 but some of their cells, their DNA, could potentially still exist within my body in the present. Some of Mum’s cells might exist within my sons’ bodies. We are all chimeras, “organisms containing cells from two or more individuals” as Lucy Jones puts it (the original chimera is a creature from Greek mythology that is part lion, part goat and part snake). I find this both deeply weird and strangely comforting. The boundary between myself and my direct maternal ancestors and descendants is a porous one.
Mothers, homes and family roles
There’s also a sense of loss in a way. I have two sons and no daughters, so that sense of time travel at the cellular level, that physical connection via oogenesis and microchimerism, ends with them. Any children they might one day have won’t possess that link back to me. Instead, they will part of a different set of Russian dolls, another chain of mothers and children time travelling back into the past and forward into the future. Really, it’s my sons rather than me who sit at the end of the motherline.
The fact that I don’t have a daughter doesn’t really feel like loss. I found it odd how many people asked me if I was sad I hadn’t had girl after my younger son was born, or wondered if we were going to try again and hope for a girl next time. I don’t believe that the relationship between mothers and sons is any less special than the one between mothers and daughters. I’ve long since stopped taking trips down the baby girl aisle in clothes shops to gaze enviously at all the frankly adorable tiny dresses (let’s face it, clothes for baby boys are generally boring and repetitive!). What I am interested in is what it might mean to be the only living female in my direct biological family. I’m surrounded by men and boys: father, brother, husband, sons. There’s a lot of testosterone and fart jokes in our house! I also have very little contact with my Mum’s two sisters, and both of them are the mothers of only sons.
I was 33 when my Mum died. Several months after her death my Dad said to me, only half-jokingly, that I was the matriarch of the family now. I didn’t feel ready to step into that role then, and now at the ripe old age of 42 I still don’t. Like being an eldest daughter, matriarch feels like a role that comes with a lot of baggage: a sense of responsibility for the wellbeing of other family members, difficulty in maintaining a boundary between yourself and the rest of the family, worrying about everything and everyone. I feel like it’s the worrying that’s the engine that keeps the whole thing running! I’d like to find a gentler, more expansive way to be the elder woman - the only woman - in the family.
At the end of Cacophony of Bone, Kerri ni Dochartaigh’s shining account of her life in 2020, she writes that:
Perhaps mother is just
another word for home.
Perhaps home is just
another word for safe,
or content,
or whole…
I recognise this idea of mother as home in my experience of mothering and being mothered, and in my experience of mother-loss. I try to be a home for my children, a place of safety where they can put down strong roots. I can’t do that in the same way for my Dad and my brother, and I’m not sure that it would be healthy to try. With Mum’s death I feel like I lost some of my sense of home, some of those roots holding me close within the wider family tree. There are places, feelings, states of being that I can’t return to anymore. But maybe what I can do is try to find new ways of being, put down new roots and grow new branches to hold us all within this new family structure.
In one of my favourite children’s books, The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper, Will Stanton is the seventh son of a seventh son who discovers on his 11th birthday that he’s an Old One with the power to move through time and space in the millennia old war between Light and Dark.
One of the many reasons I love Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones is because she sets this expectation on its head, and it’s Sophie as the eldest daughter who goes on the quest and ultimately wins the heart of the wizard Howl.