Picking Sides

Mum or Dad. Pick one. Every argument was an election nobody wanted to vote in.

It would start in the kitchen. It always started in the kitchen. Something about dinner or money or something one of them said to someone else’s mother three Christmases ago that apparently still mattered.

And within minutes the whole house would reorganise itself around the fight. Like furniture in an earthquake. Everything shifting. Everything unstable. And us, the children, standing in the hallway trying to work out which room was safe.

Picking sides wasn’t optional. It was survival. If you sided with Mum, Dad wouldn’t speak to you for two days. If you sided with Dad, Mum would cry and you’d feel like the worst person alive. If you tried to stay neutral, both of them looked at you like you’d betrayed something sacred.

I learned diplomacy before I learned long division. I could de-escalate a screaming match at nine years old. I could find the sentence that calmed one without provoking the other. I could stand in the middle of two adults and be the only person in the room acting like an adult.

That’s not a skill. That’s damage with a job title.

I carried it into every relationship afterwards. The peacekeeper. The mediator. The one who smooths things over and swallows her own feelings because the priority is always, always, always the temperature of the room.

My therapist calls it codependency. I call it Tuesday.

Because when you spend your whole childhood making sure everyone else is okay, you forget to check on yourself. And by the time someone asks how you’re doing, you genuinely don’t know. Not because you’re lying. Because you never learned to ask.

Mum or Dad. Pick one.

I’m nearly forty and I’m still picking. Still managing. Still standing in hallways working out which room is safe.

The difference is now the hallway is mine. And slowly, very slowly, I’m learning that the safe room is whichever one I’m in.