Am I my family’s keeper?

Escaping the expectations that have trapped every generation of Black women with boundaries

When people are used to seeing you carry the load, they forget to ask if it’s heavy. image credit: Shutterstock 

Imagine growing up learning struggle is normal. You watch your mother stretch meals. Your grandmother carries everybody’s problems on her back. Your older sister sacrifices her own needs just to make sure everybody else survives. You learn early that being dependable matters more than being OK. Then one day you finally begin building something for yourself. Maybe it’s college. Maybe it’s a business. Maybe it is simply the first moment in your life where you can finally breathe a little. But instead of people asking whether you are tired, hurting, overwhelmed or barely holding yourself together, they ask what you can still do for them.

That is the part nobody prepares you for.

I recently went through one of the hardest periods of my life. It was the kind of situation that changed everything emotionally, mentally and financially all at once. My family stepped in to support me, and at first, I felt incredibly grateful because during a crisis, support can feel lifesaving. Having people around you when everything feels unstable matters. But as time passed, I started realizing some of what I was receiving wasn’t really support at all. It came with expectations. It came with obligations. It came with the assumption that even while I was struggling, I was still supposed to function exactly how I always had. 

I was emotionally exhausted, stressed constantly and trying to pour back into myself while still balancing school, leadership roles, responsibilities and everyday survival. As a full-time college student involved in leadership and campus organizations, my schedule already felt overwhelming before everything happened. But even after people knew I was struggling, the requests and expectations didn’t stop. I kept hearing things like, “I’m sorry you’re going through that, but can you still help with this?” or “I know things are hard right now, but we still need you.”

Eventually I started asking myself a difficult question: Do people care about me, or do they care about what I can provide for them? The tribe survival mentality: sacrifice for the tribe at all costs. 

That realization hurt more than I expected. And I think a lot of Black women understand this feeling, even if we don’t always say it out loud. We are taught strength is our identity. We’re praised for surviving things that should have never happened to us in the first place. We become the dependable friend, reliable daughter, the student leader who always gets things done, the person everyone calls during a crisis. And after a while, people stop seeing us as human beings who need care too. They start seeing us as emotional infrastructure. Something permanent. Something built to carry weight.

Historically, Black women have been trapped inside this expectation for generations. From the “mammy” stereotype that formed post-slavery to the modern image of the endlessly resilient Black woman, society has celebrated Black women for how much pain we can endure rather than questioning why we’re expected to endure so much pain to begin with. Even now, Black women are often expected to show up for everybody else while suppressing our own exhaustion, grief and emotional needs. 

I’m still learning what boundaries look like and that needing help does not make me weak. I am still learning I don’t have to earn rest by suffering first. And more Black women deserve permission to unlearn the idea we have to carry the world alone because we always have.

Maybe the strongest thing we can do is finally admit we’re tired.