#the woes of parentification i guess

[vaugarde]

atlas and quinn's relationship is hard to really put on a family tree but yknow how mlp cant decide if twilight is spike's mom or big sister sometimes and depending on the specific conflict she can be one or the other? just imagine that

[nerdyquestier]

This is just me getting my thoughts down… somewhere.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to classify my experience with younger brothers as. 4-13 year age gap between me and the oldest/youngest. There was subtle things that feel off to remember, some things that they were too young to remember.

I used to bake with my mum as a bonding thing that the two of us did together, one of my core memories of early childhood that’s fuzzy and pretty hard to recall but it’s there. The only sibling who will remember that besides me is my older sister. That slowly went away over the years to just being something that I did for everyone else’s special events. I remember having a panic attack because I forgot to add flour to a cake meant for my brother to bring to a bake sale because I only started baking it at 8pm and I was doing it on my own.

I remember having to soothe meltdowns of my middle brother because it was seen as something that I could and therefore should do to help out because I knew what it was like the closest. I remember the times when my sister and oldest brother went no-contact with our sperm donor for months at a time leaving me and the middle brother to go there alone and leaving me to act as a buffer. I remember walking through hell every weekend trying to balance keeping him safe and keeping our sperm donor from yelling at him, drawing the yelling to me. I remember getting yelled at for not looking after him.

I remember getting yelled at for looking after them too, “you’re not their parent” but their parents weren’t interfering when one was dangerously close to a meltdown and the other was unable to pick up the cues that I trained myself to be able to. I remember being the one tasked with calming and grounding the middle brother after a meltdown, letting him hit and kick and scream at me as I did so.

I don’t want to say that there was any parentification going on there, because my sister definitely had that side way worse, but none of this seems like just… sibling stuff… now that I think about it.

This isn’t a “woe is me” thing… I’m just… confused, I guess.