Chip Chick
This year, the grandparents of this 19-year-old woman will be celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary.
They invited her entire family to go on a cruise with them in March as a family reunion. Her grandparents have six children, and their extended family includes about 125 people invited on this trip. She loves her grandparents, but her relationship with her parents has been turbulent.
“They’re incredibly emotionally immature and care entirely too much about how they appear to others and not enough about how we as a family are functioning,” she said.
Sadly, her older sister, Brittany, 20, has been struggling with an addiction, and the dynamics within the family haven’t been helping.
She’s been supporting Brittany as much as she’s able, but since her parents haven’t stepped in to do anything, she doesn’t feel like what she’s been doing is enough.
Her parents said that taking care of her sister was her obligation, and she accepted this huge duty. When she was a senior in high school, her sister got a DUI, and her life fell apart because of it. So, she put her own dreams on hold to support her sister.
For her freshman year of college, she lived at home so that she could drive her sister to appointments, work, and school.
She put her own needs on the back burner so that no one would know that their family was going through painful times.
“Unfortunately, with addiction, there’s always the chance of relapse, and my sister relapsed hard. She overdosed, and I found her and had to rush her to the hospital,” she explained.
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