Now that I’m getting older, 58, I’m looking back at life and what happened to me and certain questions I would like to get an answer. If anyone could tell me a term in psychology for what happened to me so that I could further read about it I would greatly appreciate it.
It would take several pages to explain why it happened but the simple version is my aunt who lived close by and her friend decided when I was 11 that either I or my young sister would be moving in with my aunt when we turned 21 since my aunt had dedicated her life to taking care of her parents. My sister and I were taken ‘for a ride’ and the details given to use that we could choose who it would be but one of us would be doing it.
I ignored it as I am a male and could clearly see my aunt was expecting the ‘daughter’ she never had. My younger sister totally blocked my aunt from that day forward as her way of dealing with the request. She would refuse to come in the same room with my Aunt from that point forward when my aunt visited.
As I grew older my aunt would sometimes go into great details about taking her mother to the doctor, or other event. I was hearing more than I needed. By that it was like a director going over a movie script with an actor as in what was expected. It was always in the background of this great ‘bill’ that I had to pay. My grandmother had a stroke when I was 11 and was a burden for my aunt.

Sure enough, when I told my aunt I was renting my first apartment she went nuts trying to get me in to live with her. She wanted to repeat all that she did for her mother except she wanted me to play the role she had done. I refused of course and then came 15 years of very dark anger and the question that was asked of me thousands of times of ‘who will pay me back?’. It was clear that she considered all she did for her parents as a kind of deposit and she wanted to withdraw the payments from me. After a year of her dark screaming and howling I moved out of state but found that only had limited solace.
So is it common for parental figures to expect ‘ownership’ of children of what they will be doing as adults?