My name is Tanisha Zaman. I am a young British Bangladeshi woman, only just beginning my twenties, and recently I have started mourning the fragments of my childhood that managed to survive alongside my involuntary motherhood as an eldest daughter.

Tanisha Zaman may be my name, but to too many people I am Appu, Affa, Appi, or one of the other Bengali variations of “older sister.” These are supposedly titles of affection and respect, but I have experienced very little privilege from carrying them. 

The honour attached to being the eldest daughter often feels like a façade. Behind the title lies not authority, but obligation. I am respected in name and disregarded in practice.

Most parents choose to become parents. I did not get to. I was simply born first – the eldest daughter in an immigrant household – and somewhere along the way, that became an agreement I do not remember making. Perhaps if I were royalty I would bear all the fruits of this role, but alas, instead

I became a third parent without any of the respect given to a parent and without any of the protection afforded to a child.

There is a word for what happened to me: parentification. It describes a reversal of the usual parent-child roles, where a child takes on developmentally inappropriate practical or emotional responsibilities that would ordinarily sit with an adult. Parentification can be practical: cooking, cleaning, managing school matters, caring for siblings or supervising a household. It can also be emotional: absorbing adults’ worries, mediating conflict or becoming the person everyone depends upon while having nobody to depend upon themselves.

Some responsibility can teach a child independence. Parentification is different. It is not occasionally helping your family or learning to contribute to your home. It is a sustained reversal of roles in which a child’s needs become secondary to the needs of the people around them. The child is praised for being mature, reliable and “good with children,” while the cost of that maturity remains invisible.

I was never simply good with children. I was forced to become good with them. Patience was not a natural gift; it was a survival skill. Responsibility was not something I freely developed – it was placed into my hands before they were big enough to carry it.

I manage the parental restrictions on my sisters’ devices. I complete their applications and read their school reports. I make many of their lunches and dinners – perhaps not as often as my mother, but often enough. I take them to school and pick them up. I clean up after them, teach them and help them through problems they will never attempt to solve themselves.

If I refuse, I am selfish. If I am exhausted, I am a bad sister. If they do not help themselves, it somehow becomes evidence that I have not helped them enough.

My father asks, sometimes angrily, “How will you take care of us one day?” But who decided that one day – and every day leading up to it – belonged to everybody except me?

I never chose to spend my life taking care of other people. I do not want my worth to be measured by how useful I can make myself to them. I am the third parent, but without any of the benefits. If I am sick, the household does not stop so that somebody can look after me. Heaven is not beneath my feet, yet I am expected to perform so many of the duties associated with motherhood.

My youngest sister went through a phase of calling me “Mum.” I had to tell her to stop. It pained me to hear it – not because I did not love her; she is my bundle of joy – but because it revealed what everyone had allowed me to become. It made audible the role I had been trying not to name.

I did not want to be her mother. I wanted to be her sister. More than that, I wanted the opportunity to be a child myself.

There is a particular loneliness in being not only the eldest child but the eldest of your entire generation. I am the eldest child of my generation: the eldest grandchild on both sides of my family, and by a long stretch at that; my next-youngest cousin is ten years younger than me.

My mother was also an eldest daughter, so I once thought she might understand. But she was never the eldest to the extent I am. She had older cousins, and people close to her age whom she could turn to. She had a mother at home to care for her young brothers. She carried responsibilities, but she was not the only pillar available. 

For me, there was nobody older standing nearby. No aunt or uncle of a similar age, no older sibling and no older cousin. There was only me – a single pillar expected to hold everybody else up, with nobody for me to lean against. As such, nobody in my immediate family has been the eldest in quite the way that I have. They recognise my title when it benefits them, but they do not recognise the loneliness attached to it. They see someone capable enough to carry everything, never the child who should not have been made to carry it at all.

There is one memory I think I will always resent. On my GCSE results day, I asked my mother if I could go out and celebrate. I was told that I had to be home by half past three. I could not go out with my friends for a little longer. It caused an argument with one of my friends. She was the youngest child in her family and could not understand why I could not simply stay. To her, celebrating was an ordinary choice. To me, it required permission I was never going to receive.

Years later, one of my younger sisters celebrated her own GCSE results for hours. She did not even have to explain where she was going. And where was I that day? At home, as usual, looking after our youngest sister.

Even my sister was permitted the childhood I had helped to provide for her. The difference was difficult to ignore. The freedom denied to me was reserved for somebody else. My younger siblings could experience spontaneity because I was there to absorb the responsibilities that might otherwise have restricted them.

I am repeatedly told, “They are your sisters. They are your responsibility. You are the eldest.” But being born first did not make them my children. Loving my sisters does not mean that I must surrender my personhood.

Sisterhood can involve care, loyalty and sacrifice, but it should not require one child to become a substitute parent to the others.

Islam places immense value on maintaining family ties and showing kindness to relatives, but care is not the same thing as erasing the boundaries between sisterhood and parenthood.

Sometimes this expectation is presented to me through the language of Islam, as though refusing the role means refusing my faith. That has perhaps been one of the hardest parts to untangle: distinguishing what Allah ﷻ asks of me from what culture has simply learned to expect of eldest daughters.

Yet I cannot find an Islamic teaching assigning the eldest daughter the role of second mother. There is a hadith concerning the special status of a maternal aunt, but that cannot simply be transferred to an eldest sister and used to make her responsible for raising her siblings. Islam teaches responsibility towards family, but it also repeatedly speaks in the language of justice, mercy and clearly defined rights and responsibilities. Those values matter inside the home too. Cultural expectations should not acquire religious authority merely because religious language is used to enforce them.

I can value caring for one’s family while still questioning why that care is distributed so unequally. I can believe in honouring my parents without believing that honour requires me to erase myself. I can love my sisters without accepting that I was born to raise them. For me, faith has increasingly become part of learning that these truths can coexist: devotion to family does not have to mean disappearing within it.

People make casual predictions about my future, “Tanisha will have children by twenty-eight.” I do not particularly want to. In many ways, I feel as though I have always had children.

I do still want children one day, but the experience has definitely made me more apprehensive about motherhood. In many ways, I feel as though I have already spent much of my childhood raising others, so the idea of taking on that responsibility again can feel daunting. It has not put me off marriage, but it has made me value the idea of an equal partnership where care and responsibility are genuinely shared.

I have already packed lunches, managed devices, washed bums, read reports, handled school runs and carried the constant worry of somebody else’s needs. Motherhood does not feel like a distant, instinctive desire to me. It feels like a job I began as a child and was never permitted to resign from.

People often discuss mothers who lose themselves in motherhood – women who spend so long caring for everybody else that they forget they were individuals first. But at least there was a “first.” There was once a person before the mother. I sometimes wonder whether I ever had the chance to become a person before I became responsible for everybody else.

The language of parentification helps explain why love and resentment can exist together. I love my family, but I resent the role I was required to occupy within it. Resentment does not mean that I am uncaring. It means that something was taken from me without my consent, and I am finally allowing myself to acknowledge the loss.

I resent being praised for coping with a life I never chose. I resent having to prove that I am a good daughter or a good sister by abandoning myself. I resent the assumption that my competence makes the arrangement acceptable. Most of all, I resent that I will never get my childhood back.

I am now attempting to separate who I am from what I can provide. I am trying to learn that setting a boundary does not make me selfish and that exhaustion is not evidence of devotion. I am trying to imagine a version of love that does not require my disappearance. I am also trying to understand family through the mercy Islam asks us to show one another, rather than through sacrifice demanded from one person alone.

The Qur’an commands Muslims to “be kind to parents [and] relatives.” (Surah An-Nisa 4:36)

Kindness within a family should not flow in only one direction, endlessly extracted from the person most accustomed to giving it. The same verse places this kindness within a much wider ethic of responsibility towards others; to me, that makes family care something sacred, but not something that should depend upon the quiet depletion of one daughter.

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ also said, “He is not one of us who does not have mercy on our young and does not respect our elders.” (Tirmidhi) 

I have spent my life being taught the first half of that lesson: to show mercy to those younger than me. I only wish my family had remembered the second. Being an older sister does not make me a mother, but it should not make me invisible either. If Appu, Affa and Appi are truly titles of respect, then eldest sisters deserve more than the responsibilities attached to them. They deserve tenderness, gratitude and the freedom to exist beyond what they can provide.

My name is Tanisha Zaman. I have spent so much of my life being everybody’s Appu, Affa or Appi that I sometimes need to whisper my own name back to myself. I became everybody’s older sister before I had the chance to become Tanisha. I became a third parent when all I had ever wanted was the freedom to be a child.