Why Being "The Strong One" in Your Family Is Its Own Kind of Lonely
You're the one everyone calls when something goes wrong. Somewhere in becoming the person who handles things, you stopped being someone anyone checks on.
Studies on parentification estimate that between 1.2 and 1.4 million children in the United States alone take on adult caregiving roles within their families. India does not track this number. India does not need to. Every family knows who the strong one is. The strong one does not need to be identified by a study. The strong one is identified by process of elimination: everyone else in the family has been assigned the right to fall apart, and whoever is left standing is, by default, the strong one.
The job description
We did not apply. There was no interview. No onboarding document. No salary. The role was assigned the way monsoon is assigned to July, inevitably, without consultation, and with the expectation that we would simply absorb it.
We absorb it.
We absorb Papa's silence when he comes home from work and sits in front of the television and the television watches him more than he watches it. We absorb Ma's anxiety, the one she calls "just tension," the one that fills the kitchen like gas from a leaking stove, invisible and everywhere. We absorb our sibling's crisis, the breakup, the failed exam, the career panic, because they came to us at midnight and we were awake because we are always awake because the strong one does not sleep when the family is in turbulence.
We absorb. We absorb. We absorb.
And nobody, not once, in the entire history of this arrangement, has asked: where does the strong one put it?
The comedy of it
It is funny, in the way that things are funny when the alternative is screaming. The family will have a crisis. A genuine, multi-day, all-hands crisis. Someone is ill. Someone has lost money. Someone has done something that requires a family meeting conducted in low voices after the children are asleep. And in the middle of this crisis, we will be the ones making tea. Not because we want tea. Because making tea is a task, and tasks prevent collapse, and collapse is not available to us because we are the infrastructure upon which the family's collapse is built. We are the floor. Everyone else gets to fall. We get to catch.
The humour is dark and it is ours and we deploy it sparingly because if we laughed the way we wanted to laugh, the laugh would sound wrong, it would sound like something breaking, and the strong one is not permitted to break because the breaking would cause a secondary crisis and who, exactly, would manage that one?
We mentioned this once, late one evening, in a Haven chat, between managing a parent's doctor appointment and a sibling's relationship meltdown. We said "I am the one everyone calls and nobody calls to check on" and the person on the other end said "that sounds exhausting" and the word exhausting landed with such precision that we nearly cried, which we do not do, because crying is a luxury and our schedule does not accommodate luxuries.
What the strong one actually wants
Permission. Not to collapse. Not to abandon the family. Not to stop being reliable. Just permission to be tired without the tiredness being treated as betrayal. Permission to say "I cannot do this today" without the sentence causing panic. Permission to be held, briefly, badly, imperfectly, by someone who does not need anything from us in return.
We do not ask for this. Asking for this would require admitting that the strong one is not, in fact, strong, but merely practised. And the difference between strong and practised is the difference between a wall and a person standing very still in front of a wall. From a distance, they look the same. Up close, one of them is shaking.