#39 Promotion

Within an hour of my father’s death I was given an assignment. The family doctor handed my mother and my older sister tranquilizers; and he gave me a job. He told me that I had to be strong now, because I needed to look after my mother and sister. I was a 16 year old and not a very mature one at that.

It is amazing to me, now, that he would say this to the youngest member of this dysfunctional family. Maybe it was because he had not seen or heard much from me; no breaking down; no blowing up.
I do remember, at the time, being shocked by his laying all this on me and then thinking it wasn’t fair. (My older brother had just died a few months earlier.)

Nonetheless, every day of every year since, I have worried and fretted over their well-being and their financial security. Whenever something was going wrong in their lives, I took it as a certainty that I must step in and solve the problem for them. Many people in my life have been baffled by why I was making these sacrifices but I couldn’t adequately explain. It is my responsibility; their needs come first; they can‘t take care of themselves.

It isn’t often that I think about this man I hardly knew. Before my father’s body was removed from our house, this obedient child was elevated from vulnerable teenager to head of household, thanks to him.