Yeh, kinda unceasingly. But besides feeling responsible and perhaps actually being largely responsible for my brother's well-being and care, I was responsible for my dad's as well. He used me as a therapist, a mediator, and a nurse and caregiver. When my parents split my dad, feeling obviously like between his two children I was most similar to our mother, put me in some of the roles she previously filled in his life. I was a proxy for his resentment towards her. If he was angry with me I was "just like" my mother. I was also responsible for his loneliness that he never made any attempt to better after their relationship ended. He made me his (only) friend, and that friendhip was deeply not a two-way street. He was a majorly depressed, untreated alcoholic, and I was responsible for his sadness, his happiness and all his emotional companionship. The other members of his family were at least somewhat aware of and encouraged that dynamic. I think my value to my dad's family was only connected to what sort of services I provided him. My grandmother "loved me" and praised me only in relation to me taking "good care" of my father when I was still a child. When my mother spoke to me, she truma dumped and told me things about their relationship that I was not old enough to know or process. Then I was also expected to keep these things from others/my brother.

I'm still very much not comfortable talking about any of this, and I still feel like I've "overreacted" to "normal" roles for the eldest child. I also get really anxious about certain kinds of cishet people having some of this information and going "oh, your dad made you the mom... I see" and using it in whatever "trauma = queerness" manifesto they are putting out. So it's just always felt like something I'm still not allowed to speak really very openly about, even with people I basically trust. I thought it would get easier to talk about as a I got older and people got wiser about other people, and in some ways it has. Buuut it definitely isn't what I'd hoped it be.