These are my personal opinions. Always seek a professional when you're making choices about your mental health and well-being.

Do you love your caretakers? Do you love the people that you, the people that took care of you growing up?

Whether it be your parents, adoptive parents,

um, uncle, aunt, sister, brother. I remember growing up and having my older sister,

act like more of a mom than my mom did, and that's not a slight against my mom.

It's not something bad I'm saying about my mom.

It's that her, basically, her entire existence, when my stepfather was home,

was to make sure that he didn't get angry and he didn't become

violent. So her existence in the house, from what I recall from my upbringing, was her being

the buffer between us kids and the alcoholic in the house because she did not want to

incite his behavior.

And when he drank, his behavior got worse.

So she would become more accommodating.

She would become more people pleasing and adapting to what needed to be, or she believed, needed to be done and how she

needed to act in order for him not to become dangerous.

So that's what her primary role was with us kids growing up, my sisters and my brother and all of us kids were in

this household with a dangerous man. And so my mom's primary role was to keep that dangerous

person calm, keep him balanced, as balanced as she could and keep us safe.

So when I say that my oldest sister acted like a mother more than my mother did,

that's what I mean.

And again, that's not a slight on my mom.

It is more of a definition of a role.

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