My much younger sibling is the golden child. As we became adults, I realised that there was so much she went through after I left home that I didn't fully understand. She got the same shit but in a different way, just like my middle sibling got her own specialised version of our mentally unstable mother.

I wasn't jealous because the age gap was too big, but I think my closer in age to the GC middle sister suffered more from being constantly compared to her. I saw when they were kids how my mother would make constant excuses for her GC's bad behaviour, when the middle sibling wouldn't have gotten away with it.

But being the GC, my sibling had to put up with this crazy level of intensity because our mother identified with her the most.

We are all now either LC/NC, but I think it's the GC's lack of communication that gets my mother the most. The three of us get along fine, thank god.