The Fault of the Birth Order

 

“I’m lost!” I wail into the phone, parked on an unfamiliar side street, sobbing dramatically.

“Maria! You’re in Keewatin. Just…drive around!”, my mom responds.

I’m sixteen and have just started the first week of my new job delivering newspapers. Having recently discovered that streets and avenues run parallel to each other (directions have never been my forte), I am mystified when I stumble upon an address that requires delivery to Elizabeth Avenue. Streets and avenues are supposed to be numbered, and this random name has thrown me for a loop. I immediately conclude I am lost and make like a puddle.

After a few minutes of back and forth with my mom trying to assist me (rather unhelpfully) in navigating the streets of Keewatin via phone, I hang up and follow her advice to just “drive around”. The list of oddly named avenues – Hibbing, Taconite, Howard – seems endless. Over the course of several hours, I manage to track down the houses, stopping every few feet, grabbing my list of addresses and a handful of newspapers, feeling elated every time I find a house that matches one on my list. By the time I finish, the sun is setting, and the streetlights are coming on.

When I arrive home that evening, I beg my parents to let me quit. But my desperate pleading was met with a firm no. This is not what we do. 

I stuck it out for another year and half, delivering newspapers every day after school and on weekends, waking up at 4:00 a.m. to ensure the citizens of Hibbing and Keewatin had a copy of the Hibbing Daily Tribune on their doorstep. 

The term “snow day” never really applied when it came to delivering papers. I recall many evenings and weekends bundled in my warmest winter gear, trekking through snow up to my knees as I navigated my route. And if asking a sixteen-year-old to navigate blizzards in a 1998 Grand Am to deliver newspapers feels like an unreasonable expectation to you, I think that just means that you’ve never had to deal with a seventy-five-year-old man whose Sunday paper was not delivered by 8:00 a.m.

With some years on me now, I’ve a new thought on this era of my life. It’s the fault of the birth order. As first born, I feel like my parents expected more from me, particularly when it came to having a job. I don’t recall either of my younger siblings having to endure the procession of difficult employment opportunities I did as a teenager – scrubbing toilets, wiping out bathtubs full of the pubic hairs of strangers, cleaning up vomit, waking up at ungodly hours and driving through snowstorms to deliver papers. 

My sister, being smart and athletic, didn’t get a job until her senior year in high school. And my brother reaped the benefits of the carefree existence often granted to the youngest child (who also has the genetic advantage of being the only boy).

I’m not trying to accuse my parents of favoritism. They’re honest and hard-working Iron Rangers who wanted to raise honest and hard-working kids. And like anything that you’re trying for the first time, you learn how to work out the kinks. Being the oldest, I was charged with the task of learning the value of a hard day’s work. And apparently, I learned it for the lot of us.

Perhaps this saved my siblings from having to endure puke, pubes, and inclement weather until they had properly navigated their way to young adulthood. That’s not to say that I didn’t try to impart my own lessons of wisdom. On occasion, I managed to bribe my sister into joining me on my paper route. I’d give her a handful of papers and point out the houses where they needed to be delivered. With the windows rolled down, I'd shout words of encouragement from the car, while she sprinted from house to house.

Nowadays, I’m extra appreciative of a good snow day. And smart phones and Google Maps have (mostly) solved my issues with directions (which is incredibly handy when streets abruptly change from numbers to names). If we ever figure out time travel, I’ll upend this birth order business and send the older and wiser version of me back to 2004 to lend my sixteen-year-old self a helping hand.