“The world breaks everyone, and after that many people are strong in broken places.” ~Ernest Hemingway
My grandmother just died. My sister and I came from the room where her body still lay and stood in silence in the elevator as the doors closed. My sister looked at me and said, “Now you are the last strong one in this family.”
It was comforting to hear his words. I was proud. Then almost immediately something else. My stomach clenched. I just wanted to stop the elevator, run away and never look back. My sister didn’t tell me anything new. He just put words to something I’ve known for a very long time and a part of me recognized that I wanted out. But I didn’t know how. Yet.
To understand why those words came out the way they did, we need to go back a corridor. I was six, maybe seven years old, standing in front of my mother’s room. He had come back from the psychiatric hospital a few months earlier. I was waiting for this. I imagined this, the return, the switch back, the return of life to normal, although by then I had forgotten what normal looked like.
Then he came home and closed the door. I heard his typewriter behind him. He wrote a novel.
I knocked politely. By then I had learned to be polite about my own needs. The answer came quickly: “No. Do not disturb.” I recognized the peculiar tone of his voice. I’ve heard him tell me before that I’m “too much” for him.
So I left. I don’t remember being angry. I remember feeling like I understood. As if it makes sense for the door to be closed. Like the right answer take care of me and don’t ask again. This decision, which I made somewhere in a hallway at the age of six or seven, became the blueprint for the next four decades of my life.
My mother’s absence, even when she was physically present, began earlier.
When I think back to the time before I was admitted to the psychiatric hospital, I mostly remember waiting for him to take some time for me. I remember him telling me to stop crying because it was too much for him. I accused him of stealing a ring from him, which I didn’t, simply because he did it wrong. He yelled at my father that I was too strong-willed and he couldn’t deal with me anymore.
These were all signs that a woman would break under the weight of her own psyche, but I didn’t understand that at the time.
When I was about five years old, I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital with severe psychosis. To be honest, I don’t remember much from those days. My sister was born a few months early. Suddenly, my grandmother appeared to pick me up from school. My grandparents took me and my little sister in, and suddenly I was in another city, another school, without friends. Something must have decided in me that I was alone in some essential way.
When he came back, I wanted to believe that things would be different. The closed door said no. So I became useful. I took care of my sister. I watched my father. I watched the atmosphere in our home like a little meteorologist watches the weather, always scanning, always adjusting, always making sure no one had to worry about me because I was already worried about everything else.
Later, when my parents divorced and my mother settled elsewhere, I also took care of her. I traveled by train with my sister every two weeks to visit her. You never know what to expect. Check carefully for signs of a manic episode. Walking on eggshells so you don’t trigger it.
And when, at fourteen, I decided not to visit him anymore, I tracked him down by phone from a distance. For years. I don’t remember ever being anything other than a mother. Never his daughter.
Being strong for everyone didn’t feel like something I needed to do at the time. I thought as who I am. He felt it was necessary work. But one that came with a strange sense of security. As long as I held things together, there was a role for me. A reason why it is needed. And to be honest, he felt needed, like loved.
What I didn’t understand at the time, and it took me decades to see clearly, is that I had also built a prison inside it. Because deep down I thought that if I wasn’t strong, everything would fall apart. Not just for those around me. Me too. Because who would be there to catch me? At the age of six, standing in that hallway, I decided that no one was the answer.
So I continued. The desire to be useful and noteworthy drove me through life. I worked as a professional actor for two decades. He went back to school and earned his doctorate at the age of forty-five. He started a whole new career in college. He got married and had two children. A life that from the outside looked like it had it all together. And in many ways I did. But I was also the one who answered every call, who showed up when asked, who said yes before checking to see if I had anything else to give.
The body keeps score, they say. Mine kept very careful records.
Years later, my sister went through a difficult time. Whatever was going on in my own life faded into the background. Only one bright focus: the strong one turns on. But this time my body pushed back. I suddenly felt cold to the bone. My head started spinning. Nausea. Even if I wanted to take action, I couldn’t. I lay in bed for hours, not because I decided to rest, but because I had no other option.
I was laying there under the blankets trying to warm up when something moved. My body made the decision my mind couldn’t. He wrote, “Not today.” And for the first time, I let that be enough. It felt like a relief. The next day I found out that my sister had made it. Even without me.
The real turning point came on a vacation. My mother called me. He wanted me to come over as soon as I got back and “finally” take care of him. He listed what he expected me to do, what his daughters did. When I tried to hold her back, she would tell me stories about other people’s daughters who had done these things. And suddenly, when he was silent, I calmly and almost surprised said to myself: “I’m not like that.”
I knew as I said that it was not true. Not in the way he thought. I was exactly like that for decades.
I called every day for years just to let her vent. I watched for signs that he might need to go to the hospital. In many ways, I was more his parent than his child.
But I also knew that what I said was true for me. I no longer wanted to prove otherwise. Not today. Not for this. I put it down and felt something new: relief. The relief of putting something down.
What I slowly and imperfectly understood was this: Being strong wasn’t just forced on me. I chose that too. It gave me something I desperately needed: a role, a sense of security, a way to stay close to people I loved without risking the kind of vulnerability that had cost me so much. Seeing this clearly, without blame or shame, was the most important part of the change.
Since then, the process is not about getting any less powerful. i’m still strong It really is part of who I am. What has changed is what the power is for. I no longer need the price I pay for debt. It no longer has to prove that I deserve my place.
Instead, I’m learning to be present with people I love without taking over their fight. I can let someone who cares sit on something hard without rushing to fix it. I can trust that they can, that my absence from the rescuing role is not the same as abandonment.
And slowly, in the space that opens up when I’m not in control of everything, I discover something I didn’t expect. Finally there is a place for someone to ask how I am. And now, for the first time, there is room for an actual answer.
The decision I made in front of closed doors was not a bad one. It was the best a six-year-old could do with what he had. But I’m not six years old anymore.
I was never just the strong one. I am also the one to be detained.
About Femke E. Baker
Dr. Femke E. Bakker is a political psychologist, certified meditation teacher and TEDx speaker. He is the creator of the selflessness perspective, the practice of radically accepting yourself as the most important person who consistently deserves your own gentleness. He writes and teaches self-conscious adults who, even after years of inner work, are constantly drawn back by self-criticism and people-pleasing. Find it at drfemkebakker.com.
