Everyone wants her to be the hero because she hasn’t ruined her life, yet her sister sure has. She kept her head above water while her sister spiraled and everyone else looked away, and now they expect her to carry the burden her sister left behind.
The punishment for being the reliable one in a broken family is that no one ever asks if you’re okay. They just hand you the wreckage and expect you to deal.
This 35-year-old woman is single with no kids, and she has a 33-year-old sister who has three children, but she can’t admit that she’s an addict.
Her sister frequently vanishes and abandons her kids, and this has been a pattern for more than a decade, so their family quickly swoops in when her sister goes missing.
She’s called CPS on her sister three times this year in an effort to document everything, hoping that her sister would be forced to get the help she so desperately needs.
“She’s had DUIs, wrecked cars, gone missing for weeks at a time (even while pregnant), and constantly breaks my parents’ hearts. We’ve enabled her for years — money, cars, childcare — but this year I stopped,” she explained.
“She stole from me, snuck drugs into my house, and brought unsafe people around. I took my car back, cut her off, and my family was pissed at me.”
“Recently she vanished for 3 weeks, no word to anyone, not even her kids. When she popped back up, she acted like nothing happened. My dad took the kids temporarily, but now my parents are pressuring me to take them full-time since I’m ‘in the same generation’ as my sister.”
She does have two other siblings who could step up, but her parents don’t bother them about helping with the kids.
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While she adores her nephews and nieces, she is unable to take care of them. She does not have enough money or resources to devote to all of them, and to be fair, she didn’t ask to have them.
Her therapist is the only person supporting her decision to refuse to take on her sister’s children, but her family is trying to guilt-trip her into changing her mind.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, her sister’s baby daddy is also an addict who cannot step up to care for these poor kids, so that’s not a viable option.
“I think I feel guilty because I don’t want the kids to grow up and resent me because I didn’t take them in. I don’t want them to feel unwanted because my mom reminds them that she doesn’t want to care for them daily and is unashamed of it,” she added.
She’s saying no because she knows exactly what it would cost her to say yes, and the price is too high. She’s allowed to protect her life from turning into someone else’s recovery project. I don’t think she has to justify saying no, and she has every right to walk away from what was never hers to fix in the first place.
Do you think she’s wrong for not wanting the responsibility of playing mom to her sister’s kids?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
