How being forced into the role of the family go-between trains a child to manage adult emotions, and why stepping out of the middle is the only way out.
A father tells his daughter to let her mother know the check will be late this month. Her mother tells her what she thinks of a man who can't pay on time, and the daughter, who is fourteen, decides how much of each message to pass along. Nobody asked her to do it, she did it because she was the one person both parents would still talk to.
A lot of women who grew up this way don't call it anything until their thirties, because at the time it felt like being useful.
The Invisible Job
Being the go-between starts during a bad stretch in a marriage or a divorce, and it keeps going after the stretch ends because it works for the parents. Two parents who fight whenever they speak directly can pass information through a child instead, and the child keeps the fights shorter. The marriage or the co-parenting lasts longer than it would have otherwise. The daughter in the middle feels pulled between them and can't say so to either one, and it gets worse when a parent asks her outright whose side she's on, since any answer loses her the other parent.
In a harsher form, a parent who is angry at the other parent takes it out on the child, because the child is in the house and the spouse isn't, or because yelling at a child has fewer consequences. A daughter who looks like her father, or who defends him once at dinner, can spend years being yelled at over a divorce that had nothing to do with her. Knowing it wasn't about her helps less than people assume, since she's still the one being yelled at.
Parents can also stop arguing about each other and start arguing about the child, her grades, her friends, her attitude, the boy she's seeing. Both parents agree she's the problem, so from outside the family the marriage looks like it's improved. Whatever was wrong between them never gets settled, they argue about her instead, and she spends her teenage years as the reason given for most of the fights in the house.
A Role That Doesn't Expire
None of this ends when she moves out. Twenty years later she's still the one her mother calls when her father won't pick up. Her father calls her to find out what mood her mother is in before he drives over for a grandchild's birthday. She hears about the refinance from both of them and is expected to have an opinion that satisfies both. When her father gets a diagnosis, she's the one who has to tell her mother, and then tell her father how her mother took it.
The Cost of Stepping Down
When a daughter in this position stops passing messages, each parent hears it as her choosing the other one. If she tells her mother she won't relay anything to her father anymore, her mother decides she's protecting him, and if she tells her father, he decides the opposite. Sometimes the only way to stop is to stop talking to one parent for a while, and sometimes it's both. From outside it looks like she cut off a parent over nothing in particular, when what she stopped was relaying messages between two adults, which she'd been doing since she was fourteen without either of them asking whether she wanted to.
Most parents who did this didn't plan it. Two people in a marriage that wasn't working, or a divorce that got ugly, turned to the person who was around and who they both trusted. At the time it probably seemed to them like the child was helping, and in a narrow sense she was. The parents not intending it doesn't change what the daughter spent those years doing, which was deciding each night which parent to tell what, and as an adult she gets to decide whether she keeps doing it.
If you were the go-between, you can tell each parent once, directly, that you won't pass messages or report on the other one's mood anymore. Then stick to it when the first call comes, which will probably be within a week. Each of them can call the other directly, and what happens between them after you stop is for them to work out.
Further Reading
If you find yourself constantly managing other people's moods, acting as the family go-between, or realizing that your childhood trained you to be "useful" rather than a child, understanding that dynamic is the first step to setting it down.
Explore Useful Isn't the Same as Loved