👨‍👩‍👧 Grew up the responsible sibling and now resent my siblings for never stepping up themselves

Nobody ever sat me down and formally assigned it, but by the time I was fourteen I was already the one filling out school forms in English because my parents were more comfortable in Telugu, picking my younger brother up from tuition twice a week, and signing report cards when our parents were still at work past seven. That became the shape of our house early, and none of us ever really questioned it out loud. I was the eldest of three, and somewhere along the way responsible got permanently attached to my name the way a middle name would, without anyone in the family ever deciding it on purpose. Last year our father had a cardiac scare that kept him in the hospital in Malakpet for six days. I was the one on the phone with the insurance desk arguing about a pre authorization, the one who told our relatives in Nizamabad what was happening, the one sitting outside the ICU at two in the morning while my brother and sister sent updates asking if there was anything they could do from where they were. Mostly there wasn't, by the time they asked, because I had usually already handled it an hour earlier. My sister sent flowers to the hospital room, which was kind, and also exactly the sort of gesture that told me she assumed the actual work was already covered without her. I brought it up once, carefully, saying I could use real help with this going forward, not money, just someone else occasionally carrying the coordination. Both of them said some version of we are here for you, and nothing about how things run day to day has changed since that conversation. Some weeks I resent them for a habit the three of us built together before any of us were old enough to notice we were building it. I do not know how you undo twenty years of being the default person in a family, and I am not sure my siblings have ever once considered there is anything here that needs undoing.

I'm the eldest in my family too, and the line about being the default person hit home. My younger sister once told me she never offered help because I always said I had it covered. I had never thought of it from her side. It didn't fix my tiredness, but the talk got easier. Now I name one task and ask her to own it. She forgets sometimes, but it's something.

Same role in my family, translating and organizing appointments since I was a teenager while a younger sibling never had to learn any of it properly. Started deliberately stepping back from a few smaller tasks last year just to see what would happen, and some things just did not get done at all afterward, which was its own kind of quiet answer to the whole situation.