T The Weight They Handed Down

I was a parentified child. I am one still, regardless of having grown older and bigger. Those traumas, when they are triggered, push me back to my past, to the precise moment the parentification began.

When I was ten, my brother was born, and I loved him fiercely from the start. I always took care of him to a healthy degree. But when he was a little older, my mother and my stepfather divorced, and that is where my first clear memory begins, of being overwhelmed with tasks that were never mine to carry.

They started slowly, ever increasing.

The first was discovering that my mother was cheating on my stepfather. That alone placed upon me a burden I had not signed up for.

Should I tell? Should I keep silent? Should I simply feel sorry for him? What was the right thing to do? I was eaten alive by my own thoughts.

My mother moved in with her lover, the man she had cheated with , only 3 days after my stepfather moved out, and they separated a few months later when he slunk back to his estranged wife. My mother found herself between two chairs and landed on the floor.

She became hysterical, screaming at us, that we, two sixteen-year-old girls, had to take control of the situation, that we must telephone our stepfather and her ex-lover and summon them to her side.

She gave us an ultimatum: if we did not do this, we would have to call an ambulance, because she would die. I refused outright. It was already too much, the shock of losing our beloved stepfather, my brother’s father, and enduring her lover’s presence in our home as though nothing had happened.

I could not take on one more responsibility. My sister did make the calls. She was scolded by both men. That was deeply wrong of them, too, and it broke her even further.

In the years that followed, my mother began going on dates constantly, chatting with men on Facebook day and night, leaving us to manage our little brother, then seven or eight years old.

He had fallen far behind in school , his homework had never been properly supervised, and they threatened to remove him from mainstream education, claiming he had special needs.

Since my mother’s involvement in his schooling extended no further than berating him for low marks, I took on his education myself. I was studying for my own exams, which in Hungary carry enormous weight given the points system required for university admission.

I needed to focus, yet I could not. I had to teach him to read from scratch, to do basic arithmetic and grammar. I was seventeen, nearly eighteen.

He was ultimately allowed to remain in mainstream school after sitting assessments in every subject , but it was no thanks to my mother, whom we could only ever find in front of the computer, the blue light glaring across her face.

The list of instances could stretch on and on. But this is the shape of it.

I am doing Cognitive Behavioural Therapy now, trying to unearth my negative core beliefs , the ones rooted in the parentification, and in two sentences that became ingrained in my soul from a very early age:

“you are too much” and “you are unlovable”.

These have framed my choices ever since and gifted me a tremendous amount of anxiety. A homeopathic doctor who examined me around the age of twenty told my mother he had never seen so many stress circles in a person’s eyes as he had in mine.

It was alarming, but having no tools to address them, I simply carried on living and tried to relax. Not with my luck.

I am entirely certain that I fell into so many destructive relationships and friendships because I was a prisoner of those core beliefs.

Now I practise overwriting them every single day, and I can see my past self clearly, a deeply miserable, lonely being, a dark main character, a heroine who was wronged by the adults in her life and exposed to more than is barely fathomable.

I wish I had known all of this when I had a partner who used so much cocaine he was lost most of the time, draining my money and my patience, desperate to be saved by me.

I should have known it was not my duty to rescue him.

I should have known, when I was in a relationship marked by domestic violence, that his anger would not change because of my love and care, and that it was not my life’s purpose to save him.

But I did not know better. Clearly. My mother did not know better either. And yet her machinations left me exposed to these utter nightmare people and the nightmare decisions I made along the way.

The generational traumas woven through my family are yet another thing I shall have to unravel.

I have got it before I was born, and was assigned to me when I was small and defenceless, so I could not protect myself.

And now that my beloved Nan is no longer a worry of mine, perhaps, at last, I will have the mental capacity to do so.

And I loved her tremendously, even though the past few years her condition placed yet another toll upon me and my mental health.

The constant warring between my Nan and my mother filled a plate that was already far too full.

Knowing now that she cannot be hurt any more, that she has passed over to the other side, has freed up so much space within me that I have reached milestones in my CBT I could not touch for long months.

It was obviously not Mama’s, or even my mum’s fault, she did everything to her best knowledge and abilities, paired up with her clouded self- awareness. But worrying for Nan ceaselessly, wondering how she was being treated, made my life that much harder.

I felt an enormous responsibility for her well-being, and my love for her sharpened my anxiety to a finer edge, because a parentified person can only worry, can only attempt to ease another’s pain, even when that person has asked nothing of the sort.

This is how we are programmed. That our needs are not the priority. That everyone else is more important. That we are responsible for how others feel. And if you fail at this , then you are a failure. You are defective. You are useless.

These core beliefs are buried so deep in me, intertwined with those of my twin sister , my other half, genetically and mentally, that it almost feels as though we bear each other’s traumas as well.

To untie these knots will require digging down so far that none of my shells can remain. I will have to unpick myself entirely and assemble again from the ground up.