The Seventh Child

There’s something strange about being the seventh child.

You are not the oldest the leader, the one who breaks paths.

You’re not the youngest the baby everyone protects.

You are… somewhere in the middle. A whisper in a house full of voices.

I was the seventh.

My father’s proud sons were born before me boys who carried his name, his hopes, and his traditions.

They were important.

They were loud.

They were listened to.

Me? I was the quiet one. A girl. Not useless no, but not entirely seen either.

“I need you to make tea for the guests,” my mother would say.

And I would silently take the tray, pour hot water into the chipped porcelain cups, arrange sugar cubes in a tiny glass bowl, and serve. No eye contact. No smile expected. Just done as it should be.

In our house, you didn’t speak unless spoken to. You didn’t interrupt. You didn’t argue. Especially not with boys. They had louder rights.

If they took the remote, you let them.

If they spoke over you, you lowered your voice.

If they were wrong well, they were still right.

But inside, I had my world.

A world of questions.

A world of colors and words I wasn’t allowed to say out loud.

At night, I would lie in bed and whisper things to the ceiling.

Little prayers. Little dreams.

“Maybe one day I’ll go to the city… maybe I’ll be a teacher… maybe I’ll wear perfume like my sisters…”

My dog would curl up beside me, and I’d rest my hand on his fur.

He never interrupted.

Among all the children,

you are the one easily overlooked.

And yet,

you carry a quiet hope:

to be noticed.

To be loved.

Living with that longing,

you begin to lose parts of yourself

while learning how to love others—

especially the boys from the neighborhood.

You build make-believe houses with them,

playing “happy family” in dusty corners of the yard,

creating the kind of home you wished existed in real life.

You play the mother.

He plays the father.

And the neighbor kids play your children.

It was a game,

but for us, it felt real.

Day by day, we grew up together in those imaginary homes.

We celebrated made-up holidays,

and sometimes,

we shared the sadness of days with no joy at all.

Outside our game,

the real house—the real family—was still there.

It was harder, colder, more unpredictable.

You had to adapt early.

If Father was in a bad mood,

if Mother was stressed or lost in her own thoughts,

we all felt the storm in the air.

The weather in the house changed constantly.

But we stayed.

We lived.

We learned to be present in the moment,

even while secretly dreaming of happiness.

Happiness—

despite everything.

That was the dream.

That was the mission.

And somehow, it still is.

One day, during a noisy family lunch, I reached for the last piece of bread.

A brother snatched it.

“Girls eat last,” he said with a smirk.

I wanted to cry not because I was hungry, but because of the rule.

The invisible law I hadn’t agreed to.

But I didn’t cry. I just looked down at my plate.

My sister, the bold one, saw me. Later that night, she slipped into my room.

“You know,” she whispered, “one day, you’ll eat first. You’ll live your life your way.”

I looked at her, unsure.

“You promise?” I asked.

She nodded. “I don’t make promises I don’t intend to keep. But you have to help the promise come true.”

So, I did.

I studied harder than anyone.

I worked quietly, but with fire.

I listened, observed, and took everything in.

And one day, I did leave the village.

I left to become someone else or maybe, finally, to become myself.

People think being the seventh means being small.

But we are not small.

We are survivors.

We learn how to love in silence.

How to lead without a crown.

How to listen to the whispers of our own hearts and follow them.

I may have been the seventh child.

But I became the first in my family to leave and build a new story