position matters

i have recently been speculating about the difference between being the oldest and youngest child in a family. i am the youngest of six, and sometimes i wonder if that has trained me to accept being pushed around as just standard procedure and led me to occasionally be inordinately grateful for any kind of attention thrown my way. popular wisdom has it that the youngest are always spoiled. and in some ways they probably are. but in big families it certainly isn't in the general area of attention! this is probably why i obsess so much about trying to pay so much attention to all of our 6 kids. and probably also why i feel so guilty when i get up the nerve to say that there are somethings that i really don't like or somethings that i just don't want to do...in some ways i will probably always be that little girl who was trained to think that fetchhing her brothers a beer was some kind of treat....