Being the childless, financially stable sibling in a family with a chaotic older sister is basically a full-time unpaid position that nobody interviewed you for, and that comes with zero benefits and a nephew who thinks your laptop is a juice receptacle.

The slow escalation from occasional favor to unofficial backup parent is so common it should have its own name. It never starts with someone announcing that you are now responsible for their child on a rotating basis. It starts with one evening, then one weekend, then somehow you are blocking off chunks of your calendar around someone else’s parenting schedule and calling it helping out.

Volunteering to help with a nephew once in a while is a nice thing to do, but somewhere between the smashed monitor and the juice-soaked laptop, the things you volunteer become too much. You know, time, money, sanity, that kind of stuff.