The rent was due, and I wrote the check for my family of four at 19. 

During that time, I was the primary breadwinner for my parents and my little sister.

I was thankful to help, but it also opened a rift between my family and me, which started around the time my sister was born.

Growing up as the older sibling to her, I became what I think of as a “parentified” child.

I was constantly told there would be times when I would need to be the “man of the house.”

I was expected to be the older brother to my sister, Stephanie, and to raise her in the absence of my working parents.

Stephanie wasn’t just my sister; she was more like a daughter to me.

When my parents worked long shifts during the day and night after school, I watched over her regardless of where we were, making sure she wasn’t acting out and doing what she was supposed to be doing.

It was during these times in our childhood that this rift began and grew.

“You were really distant,” Stephanie recalled recently. “I would ask you to play with me, but I would have to play by myself.”

This was true. I was so accustomed to being the only child for five years that I was used to playing by myself. I never thought to stop and think this would not be the same for my younger sister who had a brother her entire life.

Not only that, but because I was responsible for her well-being, I didn’t see myself as her playmate.

I was more parent than sibling. More man than child. 

“You were always, you still are a very serious person. You’re not loud and energetic like her,” my mother, Belen, said recently.

As the years passed, my responsibilities of being the older sibling grew.

In 2020, a year that changed the world, did the same to my family.

There was a long stretch where I was the only one in the house working full-time while attending community college full-time. This led to me carrying the sole burden of my family’s rent only six months after I had graduated high school.

“Me and your mother are going to be short this month,” my father, Martin, told me.

My father didn’t need to finish that sentence during one night in the middle of Summer 2020. I knew what was about to be asked of me. And I did it. For months, I slashed years of savings and put every cent of my biweekly fast food check toward the household rent.

But it led to more responsibilities. I became a mediator for the three people in my family, even as I struggled to keep up in other areas of my life.

I had professors telling me there’s no way in hell I’m passing their class with my busy schedule.

I could see how not being able to provide for their children was taking a toll on my parents.

The household had been in mental and emotional turmoil for two years straight. And in those two years, I grew resentful of them. Of my parents, of my little sister. I isolated myself from them. I left them alone physically and emotionally. There were days when I could tell my little sister looked down and needed help. 

“I thought you hated me, hated us,” my mother said when I asked her about this time.

“I think there were moments where you couldn’t handle it all and you just gave up.” added Stephanie.

Both of them were right.

I was too stressed from classwork and wondering whether or not my parents would qualify for unemployment because I knew by the end of summer I couldn’t give anymore.

It would be common for me to go days without speaking to them.

I don’t want to be around them. I don’t want to be like them. I recalled thinking that.

I have to stay focused in school, get good grades, and get away from here.

Friendships, family, connections, emotions — what was the point of all that? It had nothing to do with what my goals were then.

To hell with all of you, I thought. 

That thinking seemed to catch up with me in 2022.

The suicide attempt

“She tried to kill herself.” Those were the first words I heard from my mother on the phone one evening.

“What?” I responded.

I put the phone down for a second. I was waiting for my father to walk out of the backdoor of the local IHOP so I could drive him home like I did every night. 

Who was my mother referring to? There were only two women in our household. Her and my lit-…

No. No. No. No.

I put the phone back to my ear.

“Stephane tried to kill herself. Your grandma is in the hospital with her. They said she can only have a certain amount of visitors at a time.”

A knock at the passenger window brought me back from my shocked and terrified state to reality.

My dad was waiting outside the car. I let him in, silently driving home.

How do I tell him his only daughter tried to take her own life at 16?

Forget that. How do I even cope with the fact that the girl I held in my arms as a baby was almost about to leave the Earth before I did?

I broke the news to my dad when we arrived home. First, it was anger, but not at her. At himself. Then, the quiet heartbreak as he called my mother to get an update on her condition.

She had tried to drown herself before calling 911. The only reason it got that far was because we were all at work.

She was alone. Not just physically but emotionally.

“When people shut me out and give up on me, I fall into my little shell and pretend everything’s OK,” she recalled of the days and hours before her suicide attempt. “That whole facade came down when I went to the hospital.”

Then came a two-week period when my little sister was sent to a mental institute in Chino. A 16-year-old girl crying into the phone for help because she didn’t want to keep on living.

Those two weeks could have been two months, two years, with how empty each day felt. A literal hole in our home.

In my mind, that’s what that sin of mine — becoming resentful of and numb to my family — got me.

The homecoming

A couple of weeks passed in our empty, quiet home until I got another call from my mother again while I was at work at the country club a few towns over. This time with better news.

I broke California speeding laws on the freeway to get home that day.. I was lucky not to have been pulled over.

I rushed through our front door and ran to her, the softly smiling kid who had always looked up to me since she was in diapers.

The girl who, in a blink of an eye, was in high school. The girl I failed.

I didn’t let Stephanie go for a long time. Nor did I plan to let her, or anybody in our house, go again.

“You idiot,” were the first words I uttered to her under the waterfall pouring from my eyes as I hugged her. She stayed silent, holding onto me tight.

It’s been over two years since then. I’m still not the perfect brother, but I’ve learned not to view her or anyone else in contempt for things they did not know or could not control.

I’m hard on her, as I should be, but there is never an interaction between us that doesn’t end in me saying “I love you” to her.

From my sister’s perspective, “we’re good.”

“You show me K-pop videos, and we rant over that and how you don’t like NCT. And you take us to the movies, and you annoy me a lot… But I think that’s a good thing because we got closer to getting along. Even when you’re off in college, you still call me and ask me how I am doing and make sure I’m not alone,” she added.

Repairing our relationships

My story is not unique: I know other oldest siblings have faced similar family dynamics. My girlfriend, Rene, often talked me through that when I was down.

I confided in her a lot during the years I was distant from my family, and still do.

“I have an older brother. It happened with my brother. If anything, when he left, me and my parents didn’t really talk” to him, she said. “But when he came back, we actually started being a family again.”

When talking to my family about this time, I never once got a hint of resentment from them. No feeling of contempt like the feeling I had for them for over a decade.

They had already forgiven me years ago for something I had barely forgiven myself for at the beginning of last year. 

Forgiveness is the first step. 

We allow these responsibilities to control how we view those who depend on us. The oldest sibling can get over it, but they never forgive themselves for how they treat their family in the process.

My family did make some improvements on their end as well.

“I see the changes from you catering to them and them catering to you,” Rene said.

They have drilled the idea into my head of relying on them as much as they rely on me every time I see them now. I’m their rock, and they’re mine. A luxury I know not many have.

The final step is to stop viewing this responsibility as a burden.

Is it fair to be given such a responsibility at a young age?

Absolutely not.

But, the responsibility stopped becoming a burden not just because of my family’s changes but, more importantly, because of how I viewed it.

I no longer see my role as a vast boulder dragging me down. I see it as only a title I can carry for this family. A title I take great pride in. This is a title I hope any older sibling reading this can take great pride in. 

I saw myself as a harsh older brother, but my sister still sees a caring man she looks up to. My parents see a man who can take on the entire world.

That means so much to me and the resentment I once felt has been replaced with sheer love and pride.

The pride I have in being the older brother to a talented girl with the entire world in her palms, and of being the oldest son to two parents who I will never be able to repay.