Oldest daughter syndrome is a parenting choice

When I was a kid my parents divided the house into rooms for cleaning. Two kids, two parents, twelve rooms: three rooms each. Nobody did their rooms, so I did them all. With no parents home between 8am and 8pm, I had to do something remarkable to get their attention.

It didn’t work. The only way to get their attention was to participate in their fights. That’s what I think of when I look at this picture of my childhood home.

My parents’ fights were always the same fight: they both had big jobs, but my mom had better executive function (not the word we used back then, believe me) and she was furious that my Harvard-grad dad couldn’t manage his time.

The fight took many forms: Dad is not home by 10pm, mom is sad, she needs me to witness her anger. Or dad is home at 8pm but acting out his 1950s fantasy of coming home to no responsibility, so my mom throws dinner at him. I tell dad, “I’m sorry mom did that,” and we pick the food off the floor together.

Where was my brother? Invisible. He’d disappear. Not that he had good parents. He had neglectful parents. I had enmeshed parents. Oldest daughter syndrome is enmeshment.

The pattern is parentification, then responsibility, then isolation, then burnout. The parents don’t do it on purpose. They just inadvertently expect the daughter to make their lives easier, or shine a light they can mistake for their own glow, or both. Autism makes all of it worse, because oldest daughter syndrome is fundamentally a boundary problem, and autistic families are death for boundaries. But the girl participates. Once your value in the family is service, you protect that value, because it’s the only one you have.

My oldest daughter syndrome amped up when my parents had two more sons. I was 16. Throughout the boys’ childhoods I was the one protecting them from family violence. I talked to child services, talked to the school principal, fielded phone calls when the boys ran away from home.

Last month an old boyfriend called. He’s the despicable boyfriend on the first page of my first book. I couldn’t believe he was calling. Then he said something that shocked me: “How are those two brothers of yours? I remember you were with them all the time.”

A friend was dropping her kid off at school in Boston and asked me to meet for coffee. She’d cried half the day. She asked if I felt that way when I dropped my brother off at college.

I had no memory of dropping my brother off at college. She said, “I was with you! I remember it so clearly.”

I didn’t remember because I had a new baby and I was supporting my family financially. I took my brother to college anyway. He stayed with us on his vacations — each of my parents had a million-dollar home and I had a 400-square-foot rent-controlled apartment.

When I had my second kid, my aunt said, “It’s nice for you to have your own, after raising those two boys.”

“What two boys?” I asked. No one had ever said that before.

Once my parents divorced and I started to understand how much I was doing for the boys, I didn’t do less. I did more, with more devotion. Because if I stopped, I’d have no value in the family.

Eventually the girl breaks. If she breaks outward, the parents tell people she has oppositional defiant disorder, which is a family disorder we pin on one child. If she breaks inward, it’s cutting or an eating disorder or going silent — the only ways left to be the one taking care of herself, since nobody else applied for the job. Either way the family describes the break as the girl’s problem, arriving out of nowhere, after years of her being so easy.

Breaking is the good outcome. The girls who break young get to protect themselves. The ones who never break grow up and keep going. They don’t have kids, because their entire experience of children is that children are labor — they watched their parents resent the work, they did the work, and nobody volunteers for that twice. Or they become the one who takes care of the aging parents, and the siblings call her bossy and controlling. The parents call her bossy and controlling too, once the power flips. And it might be true. After forty years in the role, she is bossy and controlling. The family built her that way.

I assumed, without ever examining the assumption, that I would always be something like my brothers’ parent and they would always be something like my kids. They’re in their thirties now and they’re not interested. They want a sister, or they want distance, but they do not want the person who raised them, because needing her now would be pathetic. A sister who raises her siblings almost never gets to keep them, because they will not want the same relationship as adults, and hers is the version that requires them to stay children.

When I see an oldest daughter parenting her parents or her siblings, I want to tell her: this is not a real place for a girl to grow up, this love is not love that can feed you.

The girls don’t listen. I wouldn’t have listened either. So I’m talking to the parents — the ones whose lives are too interesting, too demanding, too unfair to do everything themselves, so it’s reasonable that their daughter picks up the slack. Parents never say it that way. They say, “She’s always been independent.” “She’s always been such a caretaker.” “She’s had a lot of problems.”

Three ways of saying the same thing: somebody had to clean the rooms, and it wasn’t going to be us.