found out i was parentified
My parents seperated when i was 4-5 years old. My father was an alcoholic whom I don't have any memories about except for when he left and one time when i got up to watch cartoons and he was drunk on the living room floor. I think parentification started then. When we were just my mother and I. My mother was never well...always sick, always had a migraine or something. I also think she over medicated because i remember being sent to different pharmacies to get pills...Even that young, she would send me by cab to run errands....by myself...with money...I went grocery shopping, jewelry shopping, went to the bank ...everything a normal adult would do... I had to do all the housekeeping on saturday mornings...even as a teenager I had to come home early from a sleepover to do my chores. She would pass behind me and check to see if i did the cleaning well enough...check for streaks in the mirrors...Had to miss school to take care of her...She told me as a young child that she was teaching me to do all this because " She was sure she would be dead by the time i turned 18 and she wanted to prepare me for life". This lasted well into adulthood...when I left home, she still had that grip on me...had to call everyday, had to run her errands, do her laundry, give her money, everytime i would pick up the phone this sense of dread overcame me... I learned there were 2 types of parentification and i suffered both....Also when i was a younger child, my first friend that i can remember se***lly abused me...the second friend used to hit me...I now understand some things about myself...like why tones of voices trigger me...why i'm only as good as how well i'm helping somebody... I am now 54 years old, my mother has been dead for 13 years...i saw a post on bored panda about parentification and that's when i learned that my childhood was taken from me and nothing was normal...it was actually abuse! i'm broken, don't know who i am