Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.
Dear Care and Feeding,
After a traumatic childhood, I built a life where I don’t have take care of people. But recently my husband’s adult daughter developed a serious illness, and she and her toddler son have moved in with us. I’m living my nightmare.
Growing up, I was the oldest of six and was expected to parent my siblings. I remember changing my first diaper at age 4 and getting yelled at for warming bottles wrong around at 5. I cannot over-stress how much I hated this or how much it messed me up. I was also my mom’s caretaker in a lot of age-inappropriate ways. She had bouts of bedrest and untreated depressive episodes. My dad acted helpless when screaming didn’t fix anything.
When my mom died of suicide, I felt responsible, but took it as a cue get out at any cost. I regret it in a lot of ways—everyone was grieving, and I all but ran away. All my sibling relationships are strained or destroyed. My siblings haven’t built happy lives, and my dad remarried rapidly and disastrously. Everyone needed help and I left.
But I had to. I built a career where I am not expected to nurture children or ill people. I have friendships built on equal exchange where it’s understood that I’ll support my friends with kids, but I will never babysit for them. And I married a widower who I thought understood this about me. I’m stepmom to his adult daughter, and grandma to her toddler son, but it’s always been more of a cordial aunt-like relationship.
And now they’ve both moved in. It’s unclear how long she’ll be in treatment, and her ex-husband is not reliable with his custody commitments. She needs care, her toddler needs care, and my husband is frankly not very patient in the hospital or good with little kids. So when I’m home from work, I end up doing it. My stepdaughter is as gracious as someone with cancer, a divorce, and a toddler could be. Her son is having a really hard time with all the upheaval. My husband is panicking and running on fumes. And I’m doing my best to be kind to my stepdaughter and grandson, but I’m living the life I dropped everything to get away from 20 years ago. No one’s done anything wrong here, but I fantasize regularly about divorcing my husband and disappearing into the night. How do I move through this?
—I Don’t Want to Be a Mom Again
Dear Don’t Want to Be a Mom,
Even without your own traumatic history, it’s so hard to be a caregiver. And it really sounds like you’re being asked to do more than you can handle right now. There is no reason that everything should always fall to you. No one likes hospitals and not everyone is good with little kids, but there are still things your husband can and should be doing to help support your family and keep the household running.
I think your first step should be having a talk with your spouse about how you’re feeling—including the fact that you love your family and want to help as much as you can, but you only have so much capacity and this situation has triggered some of your most painful memories. That is something he should really be able to understand. I hope the two of you can find ways to help and support one another.
The current circumstances are really tough, and certainly not of your choosing, and you can and should acknowledge all the things you’re struggling with—it is okay that you’re struggling, and that you need help! But this is likely a temporary situation; it doesn’t mean that the life you built for yourself is forever out of reach. All this hardship and the demands of caregiving might make you feel the way you did when you were growing up, trapped with way too much responsibility and not enough help. But feeling the same way you felt when you were a kid does not mean that you are the same person you were then, or in the same situation. Your life is different now, and so are you.
Leaving home, as you know, just means we’ve left; it doesn’t mean we’ve escaped the trauma. It does sound like you might benefit from having more support, as you face both the crisis of the moment and your memories of what happened to you when you were younger. While you’re trying to take care of everyone else, I hope you can find some ways to take care of yourself, too.
—Nicole
More Advice From Slate
Thirty years ago, I married my late husband after he lost his first wife two years earlier. His oldest daughter, “Sally,” never forgave me for that act. She was 12 at the time and grieving, but her grudge against me has worn thin in the following decades. I never expected her to accept me like her younger brother and sister did, but I hoped we’d develop a close relationship. Then I hoped for a civil one. And in the end, I just hoped that Sally would not wreck another family meal because she needed to get her digs in at me.
