“As a solid rock is not shaken by the wind, so the wise are not moved by praise or blame.”
— Dhammapada, Chapter 6 (The Wise), Verse 81
The day after my birthday always feels like a boundary post—an invisible marker I step over each year, taking stock of who I’ve become and who I’m still trying to be. This year, what keeps surfacing is how much of my adulthood has felt like stepping into a role meant for an oldest son or parent rather than a daughter. Responsibility has its own sense of direction; it settles where it wants, not where tradition says it should.
I think about my mom, unexpectedly pregnant with my youngest brother, Ethan—a one-night-stand baby conceived after she’d already been divorced for several years and was raising two kids as a single mom. It was a “red letter” episode in a devout religious community like ours; every family member had an opinion.
Ethan was due on my birthday, November 22, 1998, but stayed put for two extra weeks so he could be born on my mom’s. On my eighth birthday, while everyone was waiting for his arrival, I went with friends to the Anastasia movie premiere. I remember being excited for the new baby brother who was supposed to show up any day—imagining he’d make our little family feel even more complete. He finally arrived late, but perfect in the way babies feel when you’re young enough to believe they can fix things just by existing. After that, my mom, Seth, Ethan, and I were “the four amigos.”
Salt Lake City in the 1990s
Before my parents were divorced, our family had been a very devout Mormon household. But as the early ’90s went on, my dad became more ideological and rigid, and what had once been ordinary Mormon family life tightened into something narrower and more punishing. My mom left him in 1994, when I was three and Seth was still a baby.
She later told me how my father controlled all the money, didn’t want to celebrate holidays or birthdays, and insisted his tithing be calculated before taxes—a huge financial strain for a family that already had next to nothing. The closest I ever got to a Halloween costume in those years was a shirt with a leaf pattern; I was, as my mom said, “a personification of the harvest season.”
The breaking point came when he tried to neuter our German Shepherd in the house. (What a bizarre thing to type.) My mom walked in—holding me and my infant brother—to a home covered in dog blood. That was it. She left.
After the divorce, my mom, Seth, and I moved into a red-brick house in Millcreek near St. Mark’s Hospital, where police sometimes chased “suspected gang members” through our backyard and cars idled outside what people then called “crack houses.” It wasn’t dramatic; it was simply the texture of life in the late ’90s in a city working very hard to appear cleaner than it was.
My dad went on to work exclusively for the LDS Church for the next thirty years. There was limited contact after the divorce, mostly fighting between my parents, and once I reached my teens and stopped participating in the religion, he chose the simpler route: pretending we didn’t exist.
Tearing Myself Away from Europe
In 2017, when I was living in France and in a long-term relationship with the French boyfriend I’d met in graduate school, Ethan became addicted to benzos and attempted suicide. I listened to my mom cry on the phone every weekend, and I began studying psychoanalysis and therapeutic methods, trying to help from afar. I flew back and forth between Europe and Utah—ten- to twelve-hour trips, multiple times a year—struggling to build the life I wanted while feeling guilty for leaving my family behind.
Ethan descended into heroin addiction during the years I was working for a Cambridge tech startup—a real turning point in my career—and the stress of it all began hollowing me out. I became thin in the way actresses and models are thin, which felt like the lamest possible exchange for the inner anguish I was living with. On the surface, I looked polished and enviable; inside, I was collapsing under the pressure of financially supporting my PhD-student boyfriend and arranging any and every vacation around long-haul flights home, hoping my youngest brother wouldn’t overdose before I could get back to Utah to say goodbye.
By 2019, my relationship had begun to collapse too. The gender reversal—me as the breadwinner, him unable to take even a single trip back to Utah to meet my family, unable to ask me to marry him after years together—destroyed me in more ways than I can ever fully explain. My deteriorating health forced me to leave Cambridge and return to Salt Lake in the summer of 2019.
As I was trying to cope with the culture shock and just after my thirtieth birthday, the pandemic hit. As 2020 kicked off, I took a Marketing and IT Manager job at a bookstore/warehouse and hired Ethan so he would have structure, a paycheck, and someone who cared watching out for him. I also wanted to build a relationship with him before he died—a real possibility for years, which became a more immediate threat as fentanyl started pouring across the Southern border and into Utah. I automated the bookstore’s e-commerce operation so the store could survive the pandemic and so could my family.
Just Another Episode of Breaking Bad
While I worked at the bookstore, I went to my mom’s house every day at lunch to check the property. One afternoon I pulled up to see the back window of Ethan’s car smashed out—his crack dealer teaching him a lesson over money owed. My mom and I just stared for a moment and laughed: another day, another episode of Breaking Bad. Each night, she slept with her two standard poodles barricaded in her bedroom. I seriously considered buying a gun.
I watched my baby brother, six-foot-two, waste away to 130 lbs. It was one of the worst kinds of grief: the slow kind, the kind that sits beside you at work. My boss, usually hands-off, told me I had to fire him, which I did, after crying and begging him to get clean yet again.
Then everything snapped at once. Ethan went on a crime spree, robbing several 7-11s and ending up on the evening news across the West. Since 2021, he’s been in and out of jail. He’s totaled more cars—his own and my mom’s—than I want to tally. Recently, after getting almost clean, he was picked up on a minor traffic charge and, amid conflicting police accounts, was sentenced to five years in prison.
I feel like I helped raise him. I feel like I’ve been both sibling and parent in the same exhausted body. And I’m not sure I ever had the emotional infrastructure for the job.
My other brother, Seth, mirrors our father: a near-religious refusal to mention us. He’s built a life that pretends his mother, sister, and younger brother simply evaporated. And still—I go on. Because that’s what I was taught to do, and because stopping has never felt like an option.
“If it is endurable, then endure it.” — Marcus Aurelius
Some days I feel like the rock; other days I feel like the storm. But adulthood, I’m learning, isn’t the clean, upward trajectory I imagined. It’s a series of roles we never asked for but carry anyway. Another year older. Another year still standing.
