I’m Susan, 32. I walked into my parents’ house in the suburbs of Columbus to pick up my kids and heard my mother say, “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 TV. “They need to learn their place.”
I didn’t say anything. I collected my children and left.
But over the next few weeks, what I discovered—and what I did—made them scream in desperation. Let me back up and tell you how I got to that breaking point. For eight years of marriage, I had been gradually becoming my family’s primary financial support.
And I didn’t realize how deep it had gotten until it was too late. It started small, back when I got my first real 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.
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 groomed 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 good jobs, the requests escalated strategically. They always came with just enough guilt and just enough genuine need to make saying no 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 plead.
“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. “We hate to ask, but we don’t have options.”
Five thousand dollars.
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