despite some issues i have expressed, i must admit that in other ways parentification is a term that is attractive to me personally because my mother does literally want to be my child and wishes that i was her mother. she has told me this very clearly more than once, this is the specific fantasy she's fulfilling through me. so like i get the appeal of wanting to encapsulate the defined experience of being made to roleplay a position that, regardless of actual material characteristics, holds a specific shape and sentimental value in the eyes of the person creating the roleplay. you are not truly inhabiting the role of a parent in the context of social power allocation but you are being made to fulfill the reality of that role as imagined by the person imposing it.

i am truly being so brave with my job applications even reaching out and asking for favours which is something that goes against every survival instinct i have

linkedin bombarding me with job offers in international arbitration i could so easily get...this is the devil speaking

on a less serious note, this is a huge point of interest for me re: my unfulfilled hr au. yuna as a person in an inescapably disempowered position using her parental influence over shane to raise him towards the specific end of using the aspects of social mobility available to him to complement her own constrictions. which i mean it is also just what happens canonically. i just want to have a closer look at his later emergence into a role where the now achieved elements of social mobility force him to reckon with a newly acquired ability to harm her, while not entirely displacing her original influence. for my own entertainment

a lot of my experiences when i was younger are even difficult to comprehend under the term for said reasons. for a long time my mother had enough financial resources from state pension, alimony etc. that big elements of domestic labour were delegated externally (very thankful for this and that we can still afford some minor delegations). but when you are es. babysitting children everyone understands that just staying with them and entertaining them and being generally available to their whims counts as caretaking labour even if you are not driving them to school. and for essentially the entirety of my late childhood/ adolescence this was mostly my role: not that i had zero domestic chores, but a big chunk of my time was spent just being a constant presence of support that couldn't leave the house in order to provide company, fetch things, absorb bad moods and calm them, deal with medical emergencies when needed, make the effort of learning what neither of us knew and acquire functionalities necessary to our common existence, explaining the things i learned etc. is this parentification? for many people a child staying home with their parents and only leaving when they allow it and listening to their every indication - regardless of whose needs are being fulfilled - is a normal parent/child arrangement. i lived it as incredibly taxing and suffocating, it took up so much space in my life i still describe myself in therapy as a bare rock with no personhood attached to it. but if i were to identify some specificity to the experience it would be the construction of this false position of power for me with the specific intention of justifying extraction actually allowed by disempowerment. which is a pretty common ground for inversion of blame present in many other instances of physical/emotional/sexual violence against children. it is more clarificatory to me to work in continuity rather than strict separation with these experiences

i do hate the term parentification tho lol i use it for ease of communication because it mostly conveys the factual circumstances i want people to envision but it's clunky and cheesy and genuinely has little explanatory power

a big issue i have with the inability to identify concrete cases of parentification with anything adjacent to abusive circumstances is also that it often clearly comes from an implicit belief, that people will deny bolstering, that abuse has nothing to do with the fulfilment of real needs. you can see traces of the same belief in the insistence to debate whether sex is a need in order to oppose justifications of sexual abuse. a division of the world between people that have real needs, with the concession that the ends justify the means, and actual abusers, which do it for the love the game. i think this is a very poor reconstruction of how extraction works in interpersonal and wider social power differential and a confused ground on which to built political positions. most people leveraging their power to obtain something from others are doing it to fulfill a need of some sort. even the act of hurting in itself, of wanting to use another's body for the sole purpose of inscribing pain into it, can come from real psychological needs. the lack of need is not the reason these acts of coercion are harmful to others and should be prevented from happening

parentification is a term i use with ambivalence because i find it so tautological that it effectively explains nothing regarding the content of the parental role being reversed and the processes involved in this reversal, as well as insufficiently interrogating whether a true reversal exists rather than the simple fulfilment of normalised duties children owe to parents. still, taking it at face value for a second, i often feel a disconnect when i go from discussing this experience abstractly to practical circumstances, in the way people locate the power in the relationship. for a term like parentification to apply meaningfully at all a parent needs to be "failing" in their mandated role to some extent and that failure can easily come at the heel of various forms of societal disempowerment that the child may or may not share (es. disability, various forms of discrimination on account of gender race sexuality, alcoholism, domestic abuse etc). and this disempowerment is, in my experience, pretty often read as absolute in a way that simultaneously minimises and obscures via naturalisation that, as marginalised as they may be vis-à-vis society as a whole, those same parents are not necessarily disempowered vis-à-vis the child specifically.

i can just tell i am going to be a huge asshole today. out of the claustrophobic feeling of being surrounded and pushed in a corner

last post was brought to you by: just heard through the grapevine i wasn't invited to something and i am trying to retrace my steps in the last like five months to determine what set it off this time. i thought we were getting along...did i not laugh loud enough at someone's joke...what should i even apologise for is the thing give me something to work with