The good girl
I was a good girl. Everyone said so — at church, at family gatherings, at school. So helpful. So mature for my age. Such a help to my mother. So good at with my brother.
Nobody assigned me that work. My parents were managing more than most families are ever asked to manage.
That is how it happens. A child sees a real need going unmet and steps into the gap, quietly and competently, usually before anyone else notices the gap was there.
There is a name for it. Parentification. I was well into my clinical training before I heard the word and understood that it described my own childhood.
The child looks fine
That is the whole difficulty. It does not look like a burden being carried. It looks like a good kid — resourceful, quiet, endlessly capable, never asking for anything back. Families are grateful for that child, and never have occasion to wonder what she gave up in order to become her.
And she will not tell you, because she does not know either. A child with nothing to compare her life to cannot recognize what is being asked of her as unusual, let alone as a cost. She is not hiding it. She has no words for it.
Where serving ends
Here is what makes this so hard to see inside a church.
We are taught, correctly, to help. To serve. To put others first, to notice a need and meet it without being asked. Those are not bad instructions. They are close to the center of what we believe.
But a child quietly trying to heal her brother looks precisely like a child doing all of that beautifully. From the outside the two are identical. She is helpful. She is selfless. She never complains.
We have language for selfishness and language for service, and almost none for the thing in between — the person who can no longer tell where serving ends and disappearing begins.
Nobody ever drew that line for me. I do not think anyone in my world knew it was there to be drawn.
So let me draw it
Some of you reading this were that child. If you were, here is the sentence nobody said.
You were carrying a great deal, and it was not all yours to carry. What you built was ingenious and it was loving, and it also cost you something nobody counted. Being told you were good was never the same thing as being asked how you were.
And if you were not that child — look around. You almost certainly know one. She will be the easiest person in the room.
Lord, for the ones who are still holding up more than anyone has noticed — let somebody see them, and say so out loud. Amen.
Next time: the two times I was asked to stand up and tell everyone what God had done for our family.
Click HERE to see the 1st in this series.
