My mom and dad were entirely—at least I believe—acting from a place of simply wanting to see us more. I don’t want to sound ungrateful for being loved so much, but their tug-of-war meant that so much of our childhood ended up with Lena and me in the middle. And because of this, we rarely got time for ourselves. We didn’t have whole days or weekends with nothing to do—ever. Everything was on a calendar; one of the cardinal sins in my family was to change plans. You want to go to the football game on Friday night when it’s Papa’s weekend? Okay. Well, which weekend are you going to trade for? The weekend with the school play? You can’t do that because that would mean him having to drive you to and from each rehearsal. And now every weekend with this parent is a weekend when you’re doing fun stuff with friends instead of seeing them. Why do you always do the stuff with friends on my weekends? Why can’t this person drive you? Why do you want to be outside the house ever at age fifteen when you could sit at home and talk to your parents? Rarely were any of my parents low-key or relaxed about schedule changes. Everything needed to be planned and approved, and every parent (my mom, dad, and stepmom) had competing interests, something that Lena and I were expected to navigate and excel at. If my mom wanted us back over at 5 p.m. on a Sunday and my stepmom wanted us to go pick up one of my siblings at their friend’s house at 4:30 p.m. and my dad didn’t want us to leave his house to go pick anyone up because that would mean less time with him, what were we supposed to do? The answer: figure out which parent would be the least mad or least hurt, and hurt them. If you hurt them earlier in the month, hurt the other parent. If they were in a bad mood, pick someone else. Do you want to be yelled at or cried to?
I remember, in one of my most vulnerable conversations with my stepmother, she explained how difficult it was for her to not know what days we were coming over and for her to have to explain to her children when to expect to see us. And I finally said something that to me felt incredibly emancipatory. I was like, “You know what? No adult here has ever acknowledged how much it sucks to be Lena and me.”
My mom tried a lot, I will give her a ton of credit. She acknowledged that it was hard. She tried to be flexible and chill about scheduling. And I absolutely see where my father was coming from in terms of the fact that he did have less time with us in the custody schedule. But ultimately, all the adults were competing and also they didn’t speak to one another, so most of their pain and sadness got filtered down to pressure on Lena and me to perform. To make each weekend fun. To make each weeknight dinner conversation engaging. To make every holiday the best.
It became clear that the easiest way to take pressure off, or at least to not add to our parents’ stress, was to be Good Kids. And so we were. I don’t think it ever occurred to either Lena or me to rebel in any way. We didn’t want to make our mom sad or our dad disappointed or our stepmom angry. Our childhood was tap-dancing on eggshells.
I’m sure my parents aren’t going to like reading this. I apologize to them, because so much of the pressure came from love and necessity. I think my mom and dad did their best and I love the shit out of them. I cry if I even think about them. They’re both still alive, I just miss them so much because we live far apart and I see them only a few times each year! I cried writing this because I don’t want to hurt them again; it’s my biggest fear of all time. But I also look back at my childhood and think, My fucking God, those kids—Lena and I—needed a break.
I talked to my little sister Olivia once about how at Papa’s house—where she lived full-time—there was no such thing as sitting on the couch. If you sat on the couch, it was to watch a family movie. If someone caught you just sitting around, you were asked to do something. Chores or childcare were the most common order, sometimes homework. Occasionally, there was an order to go outside and do something active, but even that had the tinge of compulsion. For example, in the summer my stepmom used to open the pool, which was shaded and did not have a heater, making it frigid. She would then harangue us all into going swimming so that she got her money’s worth out of the pool opening, which was not logically sound at all, since the pool opening was already paid for and therefore a sunk cost. In my family, you did not expect your weekends or summers or breaks to be relaxing.
My mom’s own upbringing in many ways mirrored this, with chores and responsibility being core aspects of being a good family member, with misbehavior out of the question. You behaved or else. I think my youth provided a whole lot more warmth than hers, and tons more love, but I still think that the concept of family for me in many ways centered around obligation. The ideas of duty and love became tidally locked for me. You love these people so you do things for them, even—especially—when you don’t want to.
It’s not that I thought I would get in trouble if I didn’t oblige, but I never tested the theory. Lena and I never snuck out or got grounded or broke curfew or anything. The only rule we broke with any regularity was when our mom would tape a to-do list on the TV in the summer and we had to do everything on the list before we watched anything. (There was always a list, because God forbid we not “be productive.”) We just moved the list and watched TV and then hurried to do the chores in the last hour before she got home. And once or twice we skipped hockey practice. But we were good; we were always, always good. It wasn’t because we were going to get in trouble, or be grounded, or lose our parents’ love or anything. The major incentive for behaving was simply to make our parents’ lives easier.
I think Lena and I both recognized the obvious hard work and love our parents put into raising us, and to misbehave or to do something “foolish” or financially unsound was to dishonor that. It’s what kept me in a “practical” college major, it’s what made me not study abroad, it’s what made me not want to try cocaine ever because what if it’s laced with fentanyl or you have an unruptured brain aneurysm and you try coke once and die and then someone has to call your parents and be like, “Yeah, your idiot child did coke once and died.” I did as much as possible to keep them from having to worry about me any more than they already were. My cousin had also died when I was in high school, and my mom repeatedly made it clear that we couldn’t die, which is obviously not how the world works, but there was a lot of pressure to stay safe. We were good because it was easy for them, and because it was expected of us. We were good because it was what you did.
I put in a lot of effort to be a good kid who didn’t require work from them because they were both already overworked as it was—my mom as a single mom of two with a full-time job, and my dad as a father of five who owned his own business and worked eighty-plus-hour weeks. Lena and I knew that family meant pitching in. It meant packing your own lunch and calling your own doctors. It meant babysitting and laundry and dishes and cleaning bathrooms and grocery shopping. But it also meant giving each parent a lot of quality time, being home for dinners, doing your homework without being asked, not being late to check in with them on a night out, being generally responsible for your own shit so they didn’t have to take on more. I do not want to suggest that we did all of this perfectly all the time. We were children! We messed up a lot! The expectations, however, were sky-fucking-high.
I don’t know that I resent this per se; resent doesn’t seem like the right word at all to me. It’s too blunt and one-sided. It’s about anger and bitterness, which are not what I feel when I think about my parents. And their impossibly high expectations have helped in many ways. I went to a great school on scholarship, as did my sister. We both got great grades and did well. Neither of us smoked ever or drank until college. We’re both extremely hardworking. I still can’t, for example, go a whole day without doing something productive. I give a lot to people I am close to. I know I have done well not just from the material goods that my parents gave me, but from their expectations in regard to how I ought to behave. But there is still a bit of… soreness… I have around the fact that so much was asked of Lena and me so young.
Look, pretty much everything I have I owe to my parents; I fu
lly recognize that. But I also recognize now—which I didn’t recognize until the age of about twenty-two, when it hit me like a lightning bolt—that if they can be disappointed in me, I can also be disappointed in them. And sometimes, I am!
This revelation gave me a little more distance from them. It allowed me to do things like decide to never move back to St. Louis. It allowed me to take nonpractical trips to Europe with my best friend that my mother didn’t think were fiscally responsible.II It allowed me to choose a career that my father (jokingly??) hates but which I adore. Of course, in a broad sense they support me no matter what, and I know that they want me to be happy most of all. My mom makes that very clear, and my dad occasionally lets it slip that that’s his real goal for his kids. But they also have always had high expectations as well, which meant I always knew it was possible—easy, even—to disappoint them. And until I was farther away, I didn’t understand that the door could swing both ways.
This realization bubbled up again recently when the pandemic hit. Both of my parents logically understood the virus; neither of them thought it was a hoax or manufactured in a lab or anything. But both of them—in their mid- to late sixties—took risks that I thought were foolish. They invited friends over or played hockey or had people in their house who weren’t wearing masks or went to work like usual, and that’s just what I heard about over the phone. Now, of course, they’re adults and they can do what they want to do. There’s also a limit on how good any of us can be at keeping a deadly virus at bay through personal action. Safety is relative and often a false feeling, and I get that. My mother frequently pointed out the things that I was doing that were similar,III despite the fact that with thirty-eight years on me, she was at much higher risk. My dad just full-on did normal-life activities, despite my nagging him.
I kept wanting to scream at them, “I DIDN’T DO COCAINE IN COLLEGE SO YOU TWO WOULDN’T WORRY!!” Or, “REMEMBER WHEN YOU DIDN’T ‘GET’ WHY I WANTED TO SEE FRIENDS, PAPA? AND YOU MADE ME STAY HOME INSTEAD AND HAVE FAMILY TIME??? WHERE IS THAT INTROVERT ENERGY NOW? STAY HOME!!!” I felt the full imbalance of power, perhaps of respect. I had tried so hard to be good so they wouldn’t worry, and I felt they were sometimes only trying a medium amount. At times my parents simply didn’t seem as concerned as I was that they might die. And there was nothing I could do about it, other than nag them.
Maybe I self-policed too much as a teenager; maybe they didn’t intend for Lena and me to take them so seriously; maybe they didn’t realize how high their expectations were. Maybe I always put too much importance on what they wanted out of me. Maybe I had some room to rebel more, mess up more. And they would have loved me anyway, just as I love them anyway now. I have to let go of the idea that they’re living their life for me, just as I let go of the idea that I was living my life for them. It’s all part of the untangling of the apron strings, not in one single moment but many of them. Eventually you have to become your own person and not live for your mother’s approval or your father’s approval or even your daughter’s approval.
Although, based on their pandemic response, I feel like I should have done a whole lot more sneaking out.
What I Wouldn’t Give to Be a Teen in a Coke Ad
The way I thought youth would go is incredibly similar to a certain Coca-Cola commercial that used to play before the movies. Actually, I may be combining about six different Coke commercials, because frankly, they’re all pretty similar, but the way I remember this one is that a beautiful girl with gorgeous, shiny, perfect hair and a Polly Pocket–size body goes to a carnival and meets a “hot” teenage guyI and one of them is on a Ferris wheel and they’re both drinking fountain Cokes. There are no parents in the ad, no acne, no homework; I think the guy comes to the carnival with friends but I can’t be sure. There is very little if any talking. It’s horny but in a supremely tame, manageable way. The vibe is you long for the hot girl in your honors algebra class and then you two hold hands on the Tilt-A-Whirl and then three days later you kiss in the field that used to be a drive-in movie theater. The youth this Coke commercial was selling was one where you live in an area that has fireflies and ice cream trucks in the summer, but no racism or poverty at any time of year.
That’s what I think of when I think of youth. Not that I thought life would be exactly like that—who walks around drinking a fountain Coke? But the commercial upholds two of the tenets of youth, the things that all American teenagers are apparently promised as part of the teen experience: attractiveness and irresponsibility.
By attractiveness, I don’t mean base-level hotness, I mean being desired by others. I mean quite literally being attractive—attracting the wanting of others, people yearning for you in sexual ways. These two crazy Coke-drinking kids are horny for each other, and they honestly probably had a lot of other options at their school as far as whom to meet at the carnival. By irresponsibility, I don’t mean the abdication of responsibility, but rather the sheer lack of it. No one in the commercial is working at the carnival. No one is a teen parent. No one even has SAT prep classes the next morning at 9 a.m. The world of the Coke commercial, like my platonic ideal of youth, is carefree and romantic.
Of course, so few of us get either attractiveness or irresponsibility, let alone both of those things, out of our childhoods. For pretty much everyone who is not rich and white, you’re unlikely to be able to relish those particular benefits of being young. Certainly gender plays a huge factor, as does being cis. If you’re a girl, for example, you’re more likely to have an expectation of attractiveness, and if you’re a boy, you’re more likely to have an expectation of being irresponsible. But the expectations of both attractiveness and irresponsibility apply to everyone to some extent, to be sure. We also expect that, for the most part, young men are in their “sexual prime”II and that young women aren’t yet taking on the role of caretaker. I don’t think most people actually had the experience of being desired and having nothing to worry about, but I do think that’s what we all feel like we were promised out of youth.
I experienced neither.
Perhaps even more than being overweight, what kept me from feeling like I could experience true youth was that I helped raise my siblings who are seven, nine, and twelve years younger than I am.III
I changed hundreds of diapers. I was thrown up on more times than I can count. I helped kids with homework, I made their dinner, I packed lunches, I took them to skating practice before school and picked them up afterward. I was involved in, although not solely responsible for, things like driving lessons, college move-in, and college move-out. Off the top of my head, I know what age kids usually start crawling, eating solid foods, talking, walking, and texting their crushes. I know about teething necklaces, snaps versus zippers on onesies, PSAT registration, and dorm mini fridges. I know about cradle cap and Apgar scores. I had a car seat in my car all throughout high school. The first week of college someone made fun of me for pushing glasses away from the edge of the dining hall tables so that they didn’t get knocked over. I was so used to living with toddlers that it did not occur to me that this was a weird thing to do. While I was not a parent, I did a lot of parenting.
For a lot of reasons, many obvious, this eroded my youth. I remember mentioning to a therapist that I started doing my own laundry at one house at age seven. She stopped me and said in that grating tone that therapists sometimes use when they think they’re being gentle with you, “You were forced to hypermature. Do you get that?” After that session, I stopped going to her as a therapist because I was like, “Yeah, no fucking shit.”IV When you’re asked to care for yourself at too young of an age, you’re forced to become a responsible party, and when you’re asked to care for others, well, you’re simply not going to make it out of childhood irresponsible in almost any way.
I’m not sure which came first: being responsible or not being invited to do fun things. I think I was pretty much always a good kid, so the responsibility probably came first. But I’m sure that my friends expect
ed me to on some level grow out of it, to relax my rigidity on living up to parental expectations. Most of my friends grew from good kids to a-bit-less-good teenagers in the classic ways. I did not. When it became clear that I wasn’t going to do the teenage version of “growing up”—becoming insubordinate—it became easier for my friends to exclude me.
I already worried about being left out because of my weight. Unlike my average-weight friends, I didn’t attract anyone; an under-talked-about truth is that most friend groups past the age of like twelve revolve around people being attracted to one another. One girl likes this guy, who has a crush on this girl, who used to date that guy who is currently dating this girl and on and on. The motivation around a lot of youthful hangouts is simply the chance to be around your crush. I was not part of that. No one in the group of guys we hung out with was hoping that I would show up. I was a distraction at best and a detraction at worst. There was no need for me to be somewhere, especially if the goal of the night was to get drunk and hook up. I wasn’t going to do either, because I was responsible and fat, and so it became easy—natural, even—to exclude me from things. If you lose the opportunity to be irresponsible and attractive, it only further reinforces that you aren’t those things.
When I was invited to things, I was anxious, a worrier. I wanted to follow the rules and do the right thing. If someone’s mom said don’t go on the roof at the beginning of the night, I was the person three hours later reminding everyone, “Hey, Mrs. Ford said not to get on the roof.” I had been quasi-parenting for so long that I simply didn’t know how to turn responsibility off. I started watching my siblings when I was about eleven; I was a nervous wreck. I had no idea what I was doing, and often I was left alone with them for longer periods of time than intended. Sometimes there was no adult around to relieve me. It was mostly okay—no one died or got seriously injured ever—and I often had help from Lena, who was three years older. But when you’re responsible for kids for hours at a time, you learn to be on the lookout for everything; it becomes intrinsic to who you are. Like a drop of food coloring in water, it marks every part of you. All of a sudden, you’re the kind of person who is responsible, rather than just the person who happens to be in charge at the moment. A large part of watching kids is worrying, vigilance. You have to make sure they don’t choke on things or hit their head or jump in the pool without floaties on or pull the dog’s tail while she’s eating. The world becomes about safety when you’re in charge of children, and good safety comes from never letting your guard down.
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