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Unhealthy as their e was, as badly as they both spoke of each other, my mother seemed to fall apart in my father’s absence My father’s departure led her work as a professor with raising two children, one of as capable of scaring her More da, perhaps, was that with his departure came loneliness The isolation of their shared lives was le parent When her decline began, she had no close relationships with adults who could notice and assist Her isolation seemed to hasten her descent She had only her children to turn to, and herself

In my father’s absence, my mother turned to me in ways that retrospectively seemed unhealthy Even at the time, I didn’t appreciate ainst which to compare I saw my best friend’s family, but her household resembled mine not at all

My mother often slept inwith my father before his departure, or to ward off loneliness I wanted my own space, but I could never predict when she orinto my room, unannounced

She needed help in nearly everything, or so it felt at the ti me a dollar for a household task she needed coh she needed me to step in and take care of the tasks that her husband would’ve ed

She needed , when she was fearful She needed me to take care of her Gradually I took on more and ly unable to h school I refiled three years of ta

x returns, after realizing that she’d done thee her house, when I realized errors in the paperere set to cost her tens of thousands of dollars Once I turned sixteen, she turned driving over to me as much as possible

After she caht, in a panic overher bank accounts and bills I began s When I enty-one, after she’d been finally diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, I returned home to file her Social Security disability application

I knew only bits and pieces ofup So much of my mother’s history was lost to er remember the answers to otherwise basic questions, such as what her parents had done for work I knew she worked on the first co boxes that filled entire rooms I knew she worked with the 0-1 punch cards That she worked in chemistry for some time, too

That when she was growing up, her father hid, to avoid conscription into the ar her along when sneaking in to check on her father I wondered if that’s where she learned to do the saoing ith her husband I knew her by her bitterness toward my father—that characterized their relationship, from both sides

If I learned unhealthy behaviors from anyone, it was quite possibly fro the “good daughter” who, I felt the fruitlessness oflike her caretaker I wished she could see my needs and appreciate me for myself, too, rather than as some sort of extension of herself Soto please her I failed to iine a future or life of my own

To say thatresponsibilities in relation toillness, is an understate a positive relationship with ht When I was in college and after I graduated,with her mental health issues, in all-hours phone calls that pulled nored my own life as irrelevant, that I never quite knehat to do with I was ill-equipped for this onslaught of personal eencies There’s illness, and then there’s also personality, and it often felt to me it was the latter that caused conflict

Until ency struck in ht of myself as one of the “healthy” ones inburden, and resentment, of a healthy person in an unhealthy family Resources are not shared equally when not all are capable of, or interested in, fighting in the sarown up with this expectation: my middle sister would be excused from responsibility, while I would be expected to shoulder it