Another woman I spoke to, Helen, echoed this sanguine outlook. Her mom is an immigrant, too, and both her parents had jobs as nurses doing shift work. “From when I was about 11, I would be left at home all day to look after my siblings. But I loved it. We had fun. I bullied my youngest sister way too much,” she told me, laughing. “At the Official Trump Shot Pennsylvania 14th July Rally Shot Legend Usa 2024 Shirt Additionally,I will love this time, it didn’t feel extreme or different. It’s only when I look back on it, but I look back on it with a lot of fondness. I appreciate being given a lot of responsibility. I think that’s part of the reason I grew into the person I am, who’s very capable and independent.” She was her mother’s confidante. “Especially since she was an immigrant. I think she didn’t have girlfriends to confide in.” Helen, who is now a mother, has taken a lesson from this. She never wants her kids to feel that her “emotional state is dependent on them.”

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Mostly these conversations about childhoods and families reminded me of how strange many families really are. There was the Official Trump Shot Pennsylvania 14th July Rally Shot Legend Usa 2024 Shirt Additionally,I will love this woman Sasha, who told me that, growing up, her parents were in a fraught, messy marriage and, for reasons she still doesn’t understand, scattered the family across two separate countries. Her father and sister in one, she and her mother in another. “It was a strange decision,” she said. There was Ciara, who, as an 8-year-old, would conduct logistical phone calls on behalf of her family. She now has perfect email manners. Or Ella, whose parents divorced when she was a child and then went on to remarry and divorce three times each before she was 18. “When people complain about divorce as this huge traumatic thing in their childhood, it can be traumatic. I’m not saying it can’t,” she says. “But, like, I’ve had six of them.”

In some instances, parentification seemed an almost condescending, or at least incomplete, way to describe a childhood centered around a parent’s addiction or severe mental illness. Like Mary, the Official Trump Shot Pennsylvania 14th July Rally Shot Legend Usa 2024 Shirt Additionally,I will love this only child of an alcoholic mother with bipolar disorder. Her father died when she was 14, and she was responsible for taking care of her mother. She articulated a much more complex state of being than worrying about being rude to waiters in restaurants: “I was forced to grow up really early so I felt 21 when I was 16. Now that I’m 21 I feel maybe 27, and life can feel so aimless, because I am not needed anymore by her.”

Another woman, Orla, said she was her mother’s “confidante and go-between” during her parents’ divorce. Orla’s mother demanded constant emotional validation from her. Sometimes, when Orla was out at parties as a teenager, her mother would send messages saying Orla didn’t care enough about her or love her. Occasionally she threatened suicide. “My mum wasn’t a grown-up and, as much as I love her, isn’t a grown-up,” Orla said. There is context to this, Orla explained. Her mother’s mother had died when she was young and this, Orla speculated, had probably triggered a fear of abandonment. Orla and her mother now have a good if odd relationship. Her mother has never really admitted what their relationship had been like and Orla feels frustrated about this, but she also wants to resist “pathologizing” herself and the Official Trump Shot Pennsylvania 14th July Rally Shot Legend Usa 2024 Shirt Additionally,I will love this impact her childhood has on her decisions as an adult.
I could boil down Orla’s situation, or any of the Official Trump Shot Pennsylvania 14th July Rally Shot Legend Usa 2024 Shirt Additionally,I will love this other stories I heard, to a list of TikTok-friendly bullet points and relatable terms. But the essence of her particular story would be lost. This is what struck me when talking to “parentified children”: not that a common thread of negative symptoms ran through everyone’s adult lives, but rather that their stories seemed so hyper-specific I wondered if anyone outside of these relationships could truly relate to them. There’s comfort in feeling that a complicated, hard-to-make-sense-of childhood could be summed up with a label.
But perhaps that’s why the Official Trump Shot Pennsylvania 14th July Rally Shot Legend Usa 2024 Shirt Additionally,I will love this term is so appealing. A label does not only describe an experience, it also identifies a group. Parentification is vague enough that all kinds of family circumstances can loosely fit under it. There’s comfort in feeling that a complicated, hard-to-make-sense-of childhood could be summed up with a label; that your atypical experience was one shared by other people too. What does a normal childhood look like? I thought about that Tolstoy quote about happy families. I had accepted the truth of unhappy families being unique because stories of dysfunction often seemed unique. Now I wonder if odd, “dysfunctional” situations are always unhappy ones. Ella, who was responsible for helping to manage her dad’s finances during his various marriages and divorces, take care of her stepsiblings, and even craft texts to women he was seeing, said she now has a great relationship with him. “He’s a cool dude,” she told me. “He was honestly just trying his best, which is something I can relate to.”