Daughter No. 3: Least Documented, Well Loved

I should have seen it coming and planned for it, should have squirreled away the photos from last year or the year before.

Instead this homework assignment sent me scrambling, as it does every September: “Mom, I need baby pictures of me.”

Now, I have boxes and boxes of family photographs; hundreds, maybe thousands of baby pictures . . . babies smiling, sleeping, eating, at play.

But I can dig for hours through my collection and come up short in my search for the pictures my third-grader needs: photos of her as a baby, a toddler, on her first day of school.

There are few of them, scattered among the many. Because she is the last born, least photographed of my children . . . baby No. 3 of three.

*

My third child was a surprise. Conceived haphazardly, in a haze of sleepless nights by exhausted parents, she arrived hard on the heels of sibling No. 2.

She overheard me say this once--that her birth was not planned for like those of her sisters; that her conception took me by surprise. She brooded all day and ambushed me at bedtime with an accusation that, I suspect, still torments her.

“You didn’t want me, did you? You didn’t want another baby.”

I took her in my arms and fumbled through an explanation: You were a surprise, but not a mistake, I said.

Like a Christmas gift that you didn’t have on the list . . . something that you didn’t even know you wanted until it showed up under the tree. And it turns out to be the most precious present, the most wonderful toy, a gift so grand you couldn’t have imagined it would be so.

A surprise that blesses you and makes you grateful that someone larger than you--Santa Claus in my story; God in my life--had the wisdom to read your heart and recognize your need. And you love it very, very much.

Still, despite my best intentions, I know I sometimes make her feel as much a burden as a gift.

I am impatient with her, in ways I never was with her sisters. I am tired of untied shoes and spilled milk, of reading bedtime stories and lacing up roller-blades.

*

And so I push her sometimes when she is not quite ready, ignore her when attention is what she needs. I imagine competence, then fault her for struggling; let her fend for herself at an age when I was still indulging her sisters’ whims.

A friend of mine, a father of three, once bragged that his youngest, at 5, was so self-sufficient, “he could be raised by wolves and turn out OK.”

Maybe the third one arrives that way . . . fearless and independent, equipped for survival in the face of neglect. Or maybe we push them to leave the nest because we are weary or busy, our lives too crowded to make enough space for child No. 3.

It is the typical plight faced by the family’s youngest, says author Kevin Leman in “The New Birth Order Book” (Fleming H. Revell Co.).

“Parents are all ‘taught out’ by the time the last born arrives. . . . The tendency is to let the baby of the family sort of shift for himself.”

So the last-borns learn to survive, he says, amid shifting expectations, becoming both charmer and rebel; endearing one minute, impossible to deal with the next.

There is an upside to being the baby, of course. And my daughter knows it well. She inherits cool clothes from both her big sisters, gets a chance to see movies rated PG-13. And if I am not as enamored of her firsts, neither am I as dismayed by her failures.

She is free to define herself, to find her way, in a fashion her sisters never were.

*

I stay up long after she is in bed, searching for pictures of her as a baby . . . or pictures of her oldest sister that look enough like her to pass.

I find enough to assemble a collection, and as she glues them on the page with the delight of self-discovery, she peppers me with questions about the baby that she once was:

“How was I when I started to walk? What was my first word? What time was I born? When did I get my first tooth?”

And I simply can’t remember . . . her infancy is a blur, her toddlerhood a blank. I know she was a baby once; I was there. But the memories are hazy . . . which child did this or that and when; was it her sister or was it her?

*

Eleven months, I say. You walked at 11 months. Your first word was da-da. Your teeth started coming in at about . . . oh, 5 months. You were born at 1 a.m. . . . I think.

She studies me solemnly, not knowing whether to believe. “I’m going to look it up,” she announces, and sets off to find her baby book.

And I cringe because I am afraid of what confirmation she will find inside that volume of “Baby’s First Year” . . . where almost every page is blank.

Sandy Banks can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].