I’ve spent most of my life looking after others

Sorry, this is a bit of a long one.

There’s mentions of child abuse and suicide in this.

Sorry for how messy this is, I just wanted to get it out.

I grew up in an abusive household as the oldest and have spent most of my life acting as a parent to my siblings.

It started when my mother looked to drugs to escape our father’s violence towards her and us. We had no food in the house so I used to make bread or oats or even a cake, if we had cocoa powder, in the microwave. If we were lucky our mum would buy us a whole cooked chicken that we’d eat between the seven of us or give us tinned spaghetti for dinner.

I was always helping out my younger two siblings when they were born. Most of the time it would be feeding them. I remember seeing my sister screaming in her bed for 3 days on end without a nappy change while my mother was in hospital. I was 7, I didn’t know how to change a nappy.

I’d always watch my siblings when my mother went out, because my father would just leave or have a great time playing with his music equipment or watching his dirty movies. If he wasn’t doing that, he would get out his belt and force us to clean. I have a lot of vivid memories of violence from those times. I had to call the police at one point because my siblings were running around the neighbourhood after my father left the door open.

We ended up in foster care and it was still my responsibility to take care of my siblings and my foster siblings. I would clean the kitchen and do all the dishes, make all the lunches, do all the laundry and clean the bathroom. Even when I was home sick I was forced to do yard work, moving paving stones or fire wood for up to five hours a day. My things were usually tossed out or broken if I didn’t do it.

Later on I became the “role model” and psychologist for my family. I would spend hours listening to my family’s problems. I would financially support my mother’s addiction for fear that she would start screaming and crying and end up in prison from theft. She ended up in prison anyway. I would take my siblings out when they were depressed or buy them things when they had no money.

When I finally had a mental breakdown and ended up in youth homelessness, I started caring for my housemates when they were feeling down or had an overdose. I would be mediating for my housemates when they had fights or covering for them when they were doing drugs. They weren’t bad people, they were broken like me.

The last two and a half years have been the hardest. I ended up becoming a full time carer to my sibling with severe mental health when they came to live with me and my sister and her partner. I was already having to mediate my sister’s relationship troubles, mostly out of self preservation (when they started yelling, I would have PTSD episodes). So when my sibling came to live with me, I found that I was spending every day trying to prevent their mental illness from escalating. I would split half my money with them so that they could afford food, drive them to all their appointments and let them sleep in my bed. There was a lot of manipulation, refusing to move and throwing thing when I refused to help.

I got to a breaking point last year when my brother ended his life. I spent 24/7 trying to deescalate my siblings suicide attempts for over 6 months. My other family members were no where to be seen. I was left alone to look after them and my family’s response was “it’s not my problem if they do it”.

Even after I moved out of that situation, I’ve still been supporting my sibling for up to five hours a day by phone, especially now that they’ve been experiencing non-epileptic seizures.

I’m tired, I’ve had to put my life on hold for everyone else. My sibling blocked me last night because I was mildly irritated at something Insensitive they said. I told them to drop it because I didn’t want to start a fight, but they kept pushing.

I know they’ll probably try and get back in contact in a few days, but I don’t think I’ll let them come back into my life after this. If they could block me so easily, maybe they didn’t need me in the first place and I’ve just been too caught up in caring for others to notice.