The one who didn’t cause problems.
Amanda, four years younger, was the golden child. Artistic, spontaneous, free-spirited. She dropped out of college twice, changed majors four times, and finally got a degree in art history that led to exactly zero job prospects.
My parents called her creative.
They said she was finding herself.
I was boring.
Predictable.
I got straight A’s, went to state university on an academic scholarship, became a certified public accountant, married my high school sweetheart, and had twin babies at twenty-five.
My parents’ reaction to my twins was not joy.
It was, “That’s a lot of responsibility for someone so young. Are you sure you can handle it?”
When Amanda decided to move to Boston to explore the art scene at twenty-four with no job and no plan, my parents gave her thirty thousand dollars to get started.
When I asked for help with a down payment on a house for my growing family, my mother said, “You make good money. You should be able to save.”
I made sixty-eight thousand dollars a year as a CPA.
Marcus made fifty-two thousand dollars as a Navy logistics specialist before his deployment.
We were comfortable, but not wealthy.
Certainly not wealthy enough to be secretly supporting my parents’ lifestyle while raising twins and saving for our own future.
But when I was twenty, just starting my first real job after graduation, I visited my parents and saw a foreclosure notice on the kitchen table.
My father’s pension wasn’t enough. They had refinanced their house three times and were drowning in debt.
The house they had lived in for twenty-eight years was going to be taken away in sixty days.
I couldn’t let that happen.
Despite the favoritism, despite the way they dismissed my achievements while celebrating Amanda’s creative spirit, they were still my parents.
So I went to their bank, worked out a payment plan, and started making their mortgage payments.
Then I saw their car loan was in default, so I took that over too.
Then property taxes.
Then insurance.
Then their country club dues, because my mother said it would “break her” to lose her social standing.
For nine years, I lived modestly.
We rented instead of buying. I drove a seven-year-old Toyota. I bought the twins’ clothes at consignment sales. I clipped coupons and meal-planned obsessively while my parents maintained their three-bedroom house in the nice part of town, drove newer cars, took annual cruises, and kept their country club membership.
They never questioned where the money came from.
They just assumed things had magically gotten better.
They never thanked me because they never knew.
When I got pregnant with the twins, my mother’s response was, “Twins? That’s going to be exhausting. I hope you’re not expecting us to babysit all the time.”
They watched the twins exactly eleven times in three years.
Eleven times.
Always for a few hours. Always when it was convenient for them. Always with complaints about how tiring it was.
When Marcus got deployment orders, my mother said, “Well, that’s the military life. You knew what you were signing up for.”
When I asked if they could maybe help more while he was gone, she said, “We have our own lives, Rebecca. We can’t just drop everything because you chose to marry someone in the military.”
But they had flown to Boston six times in the past two years to visit Amanda.
They had funded her art studio to the tune of fifteen thousand dollars.
They posted constant photos on Facebook of their adventures with “our creative daughter” while I wasn’t mentioned at all.
Last Christmas, Amanda came home and announced she was taking a break from capitalism and moving back in with our parents for a while.