What It Means to Be the Eldest Daughter When the World Is Watching

(Part I: Public Version)

The first time I understood I was the “eldest daughter,” I wasn’t old. I was eight, standing in our kitchen in Italy, watching my mother stir a pot of stew while balancing a hundred invisible expectations. She didn’t sit me down to explain my new role. She didn’t need to. She just said my name with that tone — the one that isn’t loud but slices clean through the room — and handed me responsibility like it was a household item I was supposed to already know how to use.

There wasn’t a ceremony.
No announcement.
Just a shift in gravity.

From that moment on, I learned that being the eldest wasn’t about age. It was about obedience. Awareness. Anticipation. It was about reading the room before anyone else had to. It was about lowering your needs until they became indistinguishable from silence.

For years I didn’t know it was a role. I thought it was my nature.

Growing up between Nigeria and Italy made the role heavier. Before we moved to Italy when I was eight, my mum had her sisters and parents to help raise us. I had responsibilities, but not the kind that felt like they hollowed out the spine. But Italy was different. Nigeria had community; Italy had isolation. Suddenly the things that were shared became mine. Two cultures, two sets of expectations, two ways to fail.

At home, the eldest daughter becomes the extension of the mother.
Outside, she becomes the example — the bridge, the interpreter, the one who must prove her family belongs.

I don’t remember choosing this weight. I only remember realising, much later, that I never learned how to put it down.

There were moments the weight showed through the cracks.

One afternoon, my younger siblings were fighting in the living room while I was in the bedroom doing homework. I wasn’t anywhere near them when the shouting started. But I heard my mother call my name with that same slicing tone. When I stepped into the hallway, she looked at me and said, “Sei la più grande.”
That was the explanation. The indictment. The conclusion.
I was expected to fix what I didn’t break, to mediate what I didn’t witness, to absorb responsibility, despite my brother coming to this world a year before me.
I felt a flash of confusion, then resentment, then shame for feeling resentment. I didn’t argue. I just stepped in, quiet and tight-chested, because refusing would have made things worse for everyone.

There were other nights — countless nights — when the kitchen stayed full of plates and crumbs and pans after dinner, and no one said a word. Everyone drifted to their rooms. The house dimmed.
And there I was, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, standing alone at the sink.
sometimes dad or mum asked to clean. Other times I couldn’t sleep knowing the kitchen was messy. The mess felt like blame waiting to happen. So I washed the dishes, wiped the counters, scrubbed the stove until the metal smelled clean.
The next morning no one noticed.
No one asked who had done it.
I didn’t expect gratitude, but I remember feeling invisible in a way that left an ache in my sternum.

The part I rarely admit is the resentment.
Not childish resentment — adult resentment built from years of being reliable without relief, responsible without recognition.
There is a kind of anger that doesn’t explode; it ferments. It settles into your muscles and circulates through your bloodstream until it becomes indistinguishable from personality. Sometimes it even makes you sick. Your body reacts long before your mind catches up.

School wasn’t easier. Italian teachers praised me for being “calma, educata, responsabile,” as if I had chosen maturity the way other kids chose stickers. I liked being praised. But something inside me tightened each time, because the truth was: I wasn’t naturally calm. I was trained. Trained to be agreeable, to stay composed, to never require more than the room was willing to give.

By adolescence, I wasn’t the girl who handed in assignments early, but I was the girl who didn’t talk back. The girl who apologized quickly. The girl who took the blame before it landed on someone else. The girl who cleaned up messes that weren’t hers — literal and emotional — because leaving them felt dangerous.

Even now, I struggle to distinguish which parts of me are personality and which parts are obligation.

People talk about eldest daughterhood like a quirky identity — a meme, a joke.
But being the eldest daughter in a Black immigrant family is something else entirely.
It’s cultural. Structural. Gendered. Inherited. Enforced.
It’s the unspoken understanding that you are expected to survive what broke others.
It’s the expectation that you give, absorb, and endure more than your body was built for.

And I didn’t always succeed.

A few years ago, during a time when everything felt unstable, I received a phone call from home. The request was simple — something small I could technically do — but I felt my chest tighten because I had nothing left to give. I said yes anyway. Of course I did. Then I cried afterwards, quietly, ashamed of how automatic the yes still was. I was in my early 30s, an adult, yet my voice still didn’t feel like mine to use.

It took years to understand this wasn’t love.
It was conditioning.

And the world outside home reinforced it.

There was a moment at work — a moment that still burns — during an interview. The hiring manager leaned back in his chair, glanced at my face, and said, “Sai, dovresti sorridere di più.”
My brain split in half.
One part wanted to ask him why my professionalism depended on my smile.
The other part — the trained part — reminded me that I needed the job more than I required fairness.
So I said nothing. I let the words sit in the air like a stain. Later that night, anger and shame fought each other inside my chest, and the anger scared me because it was so old, so familiar, and so newly awake.

There was another moment at a previous workplace, more humiliating. A man made a sexual comment about a colleague and then pulled my cheek — a degrading gesture meant to infantilize and dominate. I froze. My mouth went dry. My body returned to eight years old before I could think. He walked away untouched.
I carried the shame alone for weeks.
Not just shame at him — shame at myself for going quiet.
But here’s the part that matters: I’m angry. Not just sad or confused. Angry that he did it. Angry that he thought he could. Angry that he probably still thinks it was harmless.
Angry at myself that I was worried my colleagues who I didn’t care about, expected a Black woman to have infinite composure while offering none in return.

This anger used to feel like betrayal — like I was ungrateful for my upbringing.
But now I see it differently.
Anger is honesty.
Anger is clarity.
Anger is the first boundary I ever learned to hold internally.

Still, the eldest daughter reflex shows up everywhere. I perform stability for people who assume I have limitless capacity. I mediate conflicts I don’t care about. I absorb other people’s anxieties so instinctively that half the time I don’t notice I’m doing it.

And yet — slowly — I am practicing something different.

Some days I say no without guilt.
Other days I bend under the old weight.
Both days count.

I wish I could tell you I’ve unlearned the role completely.
I haven’t.
It still shapes how I love, how I work, how I disappoint, how I speak, how I stay quiet.
But I’m learning to see that the eldest daughter is not a destiny — it’s a role.
And roles can be rewritten.

If some part of this piece touched a truth you don’t say out loud, write down the moment you first realised you were carrying more than your age allowed.

In my next newsletter, I’ll share a story I’ve never said publicly — the time I tried to set a boundary with someone I loved, and it went terribly wrong. Not a triumph. A rupture. And the strange clarity that followed.