Published by: Athena Nicole Palatino
Date published: August 12, 2025
Time published: 9:10 AM
SUBJECT: Parentification
Sometimes I wonder if my parents ever really grew up, or if they were just children wearing adult skin, walking through life with confused hearts and tired hands. Maybe they never had the chance to understand the weight they were carrying and maybe no one ever gave them a safe place to lay it down. So they held onto it—all of it. Until it spilled over.
And the place it spilled into was me.
I became the container for everything they could no longer hold. Not because I was strong or chosen, but because I was there. And maybe, because I was small and quiet—eager to be loved. Because I didn't know I could say no.
They handed me pieces of themselves they didn't even understand—their fears, disappointments, and dreams that had dried up before they ever had a chance to bloom. They gave me silence where comfort should have been, anger where tenderness should have lived. And I learned to receive it all with open arms, like a child who thinks love means never letting anyone down.
I became their emotional shelter, the place where their storms could rage and then go still. I learned to read their moods before I learned how to spell my own name properly. I became brave when I should have been protected. I stood tall when I should have been held. I acted like I could handle it all—I had to.
And they praised me for it. They called me mature, strong, wise beyond my years. But they never stopped to ask why I had to be. They never wondered what it cost me to become 'that' girl.
For a long time, I thought that was love, that love meant making yourself small so others could feel big. That it meant swallowing your own pain so no one else had to taste theirs. That love meant being what they needed, even if it meant losing yourself.
But now I see it differently. I see them as wounded children, still searching for someone to take their pain. I see their confusion, their grief, their inability to say, “I don't know how to do this.”
And I see myself—not as their answer, not as their solution, but as a child who deserved to be safe, soft and whole.
There is a quiet ache in that realization,
A mourning for the childhood I never fully had,
A sadness for the little girl who thought she had to carry the world just to be worthy of love.
I was never supposed to be their shelter.
I was supposed to be their child, right?
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