I’m Susan, thirty-two years old. I walked into my parents’ house in the suburbs of Columbus to pick up my kids and heard my mother say something that would change everything. “The siblings’ kids eat first, and mine wait for scraps.”
Jaime and Tyler sat in the corner, staring sadly at empty plates while my sister Jessica’s children ate seconds at the big oak dining table my dad had bought from a discount furniture store the year I left for college.
“Get used to it,” Jessica told my babies. “You were born to get leftovers.”
My father nodded, not taking his eyes off the television screen. “They need to learn their place.”
I didn’t say anything in that moment.
I collected my children and left quietly. But over the next few weeks, what I discovered, and what I did, made them understand the consequences of their choices. Let me explain how I reached that breaking point, because understanding family financial dynamics requires looking at patterns that develop over years.
For eight years of marriage, I had been gradually becoming my family’s primary financial support system. And I didn’t realize how deeply entrenched it had become until circumstances forced me to examine it closely. It started small, back when I got my first job at seventeen, working evenings at the Target off the interstate while finishing high school.
Mom asked me to contribute to household expenses, which seemed reasonable at the time. Twenty dollars here. Fifty there.
But as my income grew through community college, then state university, and into my career in corporate marketing downtown, so did their requests. What I didn’t understand then was that I was being carefully positioned as their financial solution. When I married Marcus, a software engineer I’d met at a coffee shop near Ohio State, and we both had stable careers, the requests escalated systematically.
They always came with just enough context and just enough apparent need to make declining feel impossible. “Susan, honey, your father needs dental work,” Mom would say. “Insurance doesn’t cover it all, and you know how he is about spending money on himself.”
One thousand dollars.
“Susan, Jessica’s car broke down and she needs it for work,” Dad would explain. “She’s already struggling as a single mom.”
Two thousand for repairs. “Susan, we need help with the roof before winter,” they’d explain together at the kitchen table, producing contractor estimates and worried expressions.
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