Katharina Buczek
This 19-year-old woman has five younger siblings – an 11-year-old brother, a 9-year-old sister, and triplets, who are 1-year-old. So, despite having her own job, her parents “rope her” into babysitting her five siblings nearly every single day.
In fact, she’s even had to change her work schedule around and give up some shits – working fewer hours – in order to make time for babysitting whenever her parents dump her siblings on her.
“At first, I didn’t mind because I was living under my parent’s roof rent-free and because my job doesn’t pay enough for me to rent an apartment where we live,” she recalled.
However, since she’s now expected to babysit so often, she’s barely able to see her friends or participate in any recreational activities on the weekends because her parents always just hand off her siblings and disappear.
According to her, she often puts at least one of the triplets to sleep, which can take a few hours and cause her to lose sleep. Then, in the mornings, she is up from 4:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m., helping get the triplets ready for daycare. And more often than not, one of the triplets ends up needing to stay home with her for some reason.
“One of the triplets even calls me ‘Ma’ and my mom ‘Mama,’ which my mom hates,” she revealed.
But, now that she’s 19, she is looking forward to going away to college. One of the colleges she applied for is also located across the country, which would help her get away from her family and escape the constant babysitting.
To be clear, she doesn’t just want to attend this college since it’s far from her hometown. It also offers a program for the degree that she wants. Being far away from her family would just be a bonus, especially since she’s tried to set boundaries with her parents in the past, and they always just ignored her.
Still, she realizes that if she goes through with her plan and attends college far away, her parents will need to pay expensive daycare fees for three babies – the triplets – since both of her parents work.
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