Were You Born With a Job?
(Originally posted Feb 27th)
Unfortunately, some children are not born from love, but with a job assigned to them.
A job to help their mother grow up and make better choices. A job to keep their father from leaving. A job to make their parents look better in the eyes of their peers. A job to get and keep a parent sober. A job to fulfill the dreams a parent never realized. A job to replace a lost sibling, a failed marriage, or a void too deep to name. These children do not arrive as blank slates but with pre-written scripts. An entirely fictional character assigned to them to play before they even take their first breath. From the moment they enter the world, they are measured not by who they are, but by how well they perform.
Sometimes these job assignments are unconscious. Parents don’t always realize the weight they place on the shoulders of a child who was only meant to BE. They don’t recognize that their longing for love, stability, or redemption is being unconsciously offloaded onto someone who never signed up for it. Other times, it is painfully intentional. Rooted in the belief that a baby can fix what is broken, that their existence alone will mend relationships, heal traumas, or bring meaning to a life that feels empty.
A child cannot fulfill a role that is not theirs to bear. The reality is, children make an already stressful situation harder. There's a whole person to worry about now! Expenses, emotional labor, physical labor, routines call for an incredible amount of selflessness, which is severely lacking when children are brought into the world this way. In setting their child up to fail, they've also set themselves up to fail. Rather than admit this to themselves, they put further blame onto the child. No baby can come into this world and rewrite a parent’s past nor sculpt their future into something whole. When the child inevitably fails at this impossible task, the love they receive dries up, because it's always been conditional.
This is where the fracture begins. Love is replaced with obligation, with unspoken contracts and unfulfilled expectations. The child senses the shift and the intentions that drove it. They can sense that they are not being seen but rather used, and that their worth measured by their usefulness. They may be praised when they reflect well on their parents, but ignored when they express individuality.
Some parents wear their child like a badge of honor, a token of status. Parading them in church communities routinely as proof of their own success or pretending to be close and supportive while the camera is taking forced and posed pictures for social media. Look at what I’ve done! Look how good they turned out! But behind closed doors, the connection is cold, transactional, distant.
The moment the child deviates from the role assigned to them like choosing a different path, expressing a different identity, refusing to carry the burdens they inherited, they are met with resentment, disappointment, or even complete erasure.
This is how estrangement begins. Sometimes physically, but often emotionally long before that. Some children remain in their families but feel like ghosts. They play the role and perform the script, but they know deep down that the love they receive as a "reward" is fragile, conditional... a performance itself.
Others choose to leave, to reclaim their own narrative, to build a life outside of the expectations placed upon them. But even then, the echoes of that original contract remain through the guilt, the shame, and the grief.
The question often weighs heavily deep in the subconscious mind: If I was never enough for THEM as I truly am, will I ever be good enough for anyone to really love?
If you were born with an assignment you were doomed to fail, that doesn’t make you a failure.
Your caregivers may have treated you that way, and may still to this day, but that is a reflection on them, their wounds, and their poor choices. Their inability to see you as your own person rather than a role to be filled is a deep failure and character flaw in THEM.
Today, we hold the power to decide what is truly ours and what never was. We have to find the line between the parts of ourselves that were created for us. All of the expectations, the obligations, the versions of us that only existed to keep the peace, and the parts of us that are of our own making today.
You do not have to carry what was never yours. You do not have to hold onto identities that were forced upon you and you certainly don't own the guilt of failing to meet these ridiculous expectations.
You are allowed to release the weight of what they needed you to be and step fully into who you are. And that is enough. It always has been, it always will be.
