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thecloserkin · 6 years

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fic rec: in fire, in ice by moirariordan

fandom: Wizards of Waverly Palace

pairing: Justin Russo/Alex Russo

word count: 25k

Is it canon: Yes

Is it explicit: No

Is it endgame: Yes

Is it shippable: Like fire

It’s an on-the-run story! Where they get fake married! For real this fic is #sibcestgoals. It’s justifiably the most widely read and influential fic in the fandom, whose influence transcends the fandom itself: the tagline ought to be “come to the dark side, we have incest-flavored cookies.” Say you had a friend who had never read a word of fanfiction in their life. For a starter pack you would hand them something like The Shoebox Project, right? Something accessible, for a pairing that’s ludicrously shippable, something that would rip their heart out and leave them aching for more. That’s what this story is. I would have no qualms recc’ing it to anyone on the street. Just look at the testimonials on Fanlore or on the TVTropes rec page —these people can’t all be incest shippers right?

Wizards of Waverly Place was a teen sitcom that aired from 2007-2012 on the Disney Channel, starring Selena Gomez and David Henrie as the titular brother-and-sister wizards. They have parents and a younger brother too but for shipping purposes Justin/Alex is the six-ton orca whale in the room. Justin is two years older, boring and responsible; Alex is the wild child. There’s a lot of banter and a lot of snark and it’s that dynamic where the older male does everything by the book and the younger female character categorically refuses to even crack open the spine of a book. There was a made-for-TV movie in 2009, and 87% of people who caught it while channel-surfing came away under the impression that the male lead was Selena Gomez’s boyfriend. I know this because I conducted a highly scientific poll, obviously.

Let me say upfront that I love this story but every time I read it it’s like I just watched Schindler’s List. It’s literally a story about a wizard Holocaust.

It starts with an old man who accidentally torpedoes the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy (or the in-universe equilavent). It’s important to emphasize how he gives the game away, which is by conjuring a specter of his dead wife, one that unfortunately winds up outliving him; when the police broke his door down they found her weeping over his corpse. He loved her so much he preferred a flimsy facsimile over the lack of her. Or is it that he loved her so little he would settle for a cheap echo? Either way, love is the downfall of the wizarding community. The tension between love and magic is at the heart of this fic, for love is about sacrifice and at its root, so is magic.

The muggles’ initial reaction is consternation. The dead old man was unfortunately in possession of an extensive and illegal magical library, and pretty soon “every New Age hippie who ever read a deck of tarot cards” descends on New York City to pore over it. Consternation turns to fear turns to anger/mistrust turns to outright persecution of wizardkind.

Alex keeps waiting and waiting for someone to do something, to stop it, to make it go away, but nothing happens.

Alex is still in high school. There are people out there every day braying for her blood and calling for her family’s heads on spikes. Plot happens.

“Is this a good thing?” she asks, because Justin always knows what’s good and right and what’s not, and she really needs to know. He’s silent for a very long moment. “I don’t know,” he says, and for some reason this is more terrifying than anything.

She’s relied on Justin all these years to be her moral compass and when he admits he’s at a loss her whole world crumbles. They’re not canonically codependent, I think, but Alex does a lot of shit she wouldn’t otherwise if she wasn’t relying on Justin to bail her out. Likewise Justin resents how Alex’s raw gumption allows her to brazenly bluff her way through stuff he has to work his tail off for. I think Justin gives himself less credit than he deserves because Alex is right, he is insanely smart and talented. There’s an actual no-word-of-a-lie witchhunt going on and Justin still manages to graduate valedictorian.

There’s an underground railroad of sorts that smuggles wizards out, endowing them with new identities and new memories. The Russos grow desperate after Justin and Alex’s mom falls pregnant, but for plot reasons they can’t all be relocated so Justin and Alex stay behind. There are tearful farewells. The plan is to wait until Alex finishes high school, then rejoin the rest of the family. Things get even darker, but Justin “makes her smile like it’s his job.” LIKE IT’S HIS JOB. My friends, this is the good shit right here.

They eat in his room, most of the time, and do homework. Alex knows that he finds it soothing.

It’s a ritual, don’t you see? Other people meditate; Justin does homework. Alex does it too to keep him company. In fact Alex spends a lot of time in Justin’s bed. She’s always falling asleep there or waking up there and it’s not sexual but it gives you an idea of where her head’s at. Once, she slams out of the living room during an argument, and after a disorienting moment realizes it’s not her room she’s retreated into, it’s Justin’s. Her subconscious has obviously decided Justin’s room is the safest sanctuary there is.

Justin takes her out to dinner to celebrate her grades

IT’S A DAAAAATE only neither of them know it yet haha!

When Alex’s lifelong BFF announces she’s joining the Youth Nazi and invites Alex to join up with her, Alex runs away to a bench in Central Park. Justin shows up in short order:

“How’d you find me?”

“Are you kidding? You always come here when you’re upset.” He sits next to her. “Remember the time you ran away when Mom and Dad wouldn’t let you get a ferret?”

Nobody is conflating the pain of being denied a potential pet ferret to the pain of being deemed subhuman by one’s best friend, but the point of this scene is (1) that Justin gets her, in all her melodramatic over-the-top pettiness, and (2) Justin notices and remembers which bench she prefers — it’s a big gorram park after all. Eventually the political situation comes to a head and Justin and Alex decide it’s not safe to stay in New York City any longer, and they gather up their cash and bounce. Once they leave they have no way of getting back in touch with their parents but they have no choice; it’s too dangerous to stay:

They sleep in cheap motels and pay in cash under fake names, staying under the radar as much as possible because they’re not sure what else to do. They run out of cash in Maryland and get a decent hotel room under the fake account name.

They stop in Indianapolis to celebrate Justin’s twentieth birthday. Alex scores some champagne with one of the fake IDs she’d snagged before leaving New York and they drink it in a hotel room, the TV off and knees touching on the bed

They make it to Denver and get a small apartment and tell everyone they’re newlyweds and Alex dyes her hair red

OMG THEY’RE FAKE MARRIED I AM DECEASED

p sure there was also blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bedsharing in the hotel room

Alex’s hair color is a solid proxy for her state of mind

They save half their money each month in case they have to run again, and for a little bit, things are kind of nice. After her shifts, Alex will walk to the library where Justin works and sit at a table behind the corner with him, reading history books and novels.

Ladies and gentlemen I give you Alex Russo, the girl who a few months ago wouldn’t know which end of a book was up. She learns to love BOOKS and LIBRARIES on JUSTIN’S account and that is everything. Well, this is a nice respite but it doesn’t last and they have to keep running because Alex is assaulted at her waitressing job by a creepy customer who won’t take no for an answer. It’s a highly unrealistic stranger-in-a-dark-alley attempted assault situation but I will let that slide because the point is she instinctively spews magic in self-defense, which of course will bring the authorities down on them in no time. She’s scared shitless and she runs straight into Justin’s arms, the only place she feels safe:

Justin nearly freaks when he sees her, dragging her into the back office and touching her face, her arms, over and over as if to reassure himself that she’s okay. He sees the scrapes on her back and frowns, pulling off his soft cotton jacket and wrapping it around her as she explains what happened in a monotone voice. “We have to go,” she says, “tonight.” He nods and kisses her nose. “You did what you had to do,” he says, and something tight unravels because he’s not mad.

There is so much tenderness in that nose kiss. I feel like they’ve been partners for a long time but this is where it really clicks that Justin’s not “in charge” anymore, he’s not the older brother who knows best, they’re just two teenagers clinging to each other on a life raft because they are everything the other has left.

“The baby must be three years old now,” Alex muses. The champagne they’re drinking isn’t nearly enough to get them wasted, and she suddenly wishes that they were the type of people who get drunk. “Max is fifteen. In high school.”

This made me so sad, how they used to be a five-person family unit and now Alex and Justin are cut adrift and they’ve formed a unit of their own but they’ll never stop missing the others.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you with straight hair since New York,” he says when she emerges from the bathroom. He flicks her bangs away from her face. “You usually look like a street urchin.”

All the hairstyle changes for disguise purposes but she’s still his sister underneath. He’d know her anywhere. Here’s the scene where they first kiss — they’re standing on their own doorstep, having gone out to celebrate his birthday, and Alex (as you would expect) initiates it:

He narrows his eyes at her and she looks, looks, because she can’t have read this wrong – no, she didn’t. There is nothing in the world that she knows better than Justin – his face, his body, his head, his mind, his heart.

Yesssss I need it like air. Later:

(They don’t talk about what happened on his birthday, but they’ve started asking for single rooms.)

Eventually they settle in rural Italy, which I guess doesn’t have the same 24-hour surveillance panopticon that we have here in the USA so it’s easier for wizards to slip through the cracks. I like to imagine them in in the Tuscan hills. Justin is a schoolteacher and Alex a graphic designer. They remain for many years below the radar, until Alex is recruited into the Resistance to help smuggle other wizards out through the Underground Railroad the same way she and Justin were smuggled out. She feels a moral obligation to do it, even if it kills Justin to watch her diving repeatedly into danger and him unable to follow.

She’s never been that great at protecting people, she knows. When she was seven and Justin was nine, there’d been a bully that lived in the apartment building across the street who used to try and steal her lunch money every day, and every day she would offer Justin’s in return for her own relief. When she was twelve and he was fourteen, they broke Theresa’s glass statuette from Barcelona during a fight and she blamed him without a second thought, and when she was seventeen and he was nineteen, she let him pass up freedom in order to protect her and she will never forget all that he gave up the day he made that decision.

Alex’s great grief is that Justin has given up an assuredly brilliant future, in which he would have shone as a superstar and had his pick of careers, in exchange for being hers.

“You’re so smart, and grown up and good and – and handsome, and I’m irresponsible and immature and –“

She sees his being with her as a sacrifice. She doesn’t know anything about sacrifice yet. She finds her parents living in the same apartment in New York they fled so many lives ago. They’re waiting for Justin and Alex to come back, or send word, or something. It exposes them to an acute degree of risk, of course. Alex orchestrates the Resistance mission to evacuate/relocate her parents, but she does not reveal herself nor reconnect with them. She lets them go. It’s unclear why, although I suspect it would be tough to have a relationship with them without dealing with the elephant in the room, the fact that she and Justin are now together. Yet I think it was important for her to see her parents one last time, because it gave her closure. After she returns to Italy she and Justin welcome their first child. The baby is a mini-dynamo and a nexus of magical potential, sending up trails of rainbow sparks even in utero, so Alex makes the painful decision to give up her powers for good. This means she will be mortal, and so will the child, and any future children or grandchildren. It also means she and Justin will be allowed to stay under the radar and hang onto the life they have painstakingly built. Remember how I said that the root of both love and magic is sacrifice? This is the sacrifice that defines Alex Russo, that she was willing to give up magic -- the thing that has shaped her identity for twenty-odd years -- in order to be with Justin.

#wizards of waverly place #wowp #fic rec #jalex

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nancygduarteus · 7 years

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When Kids Have to Act Like Parents, It Affects Them for Life

Laura Kiesel was only six years old when she became a parent to her infant brother. At home, his crib was placed directly next to her bed, so that when he cried at night, she was the one to pick him up and sing him back to sleep. She says she was also in charge of changing his diapers and making sure he was fed every day. For the majority of her early childhood, she remembers that she tended to his needs while her own mother was in the depths of heroin addiction.

From as early as she can remember, Kiesel says she had to take care of herself—preparing her own meals, clothing herself, and keeping herself entertained. At school, she remembers becoming a morose and withdrawn child whose hair was often dirty and unkempt.

It was a dark time made even bleaker by her mother’s violent outbursts. “During dope sickness, she would unleash a lot of fury onto me,” said Kiesel, a 38-year-old freelance writer. “I became the buffer or scapegoat of her rage to divert it [from] my younger (much more defenseless) brother.” (Kiesel’s mother is no longer living.)

At one point, she says she learned to take her small brother and kitten into their bathroom and barricade the door to keep them safe. “I felt a lot of weight on my shoulders, like my brother could die without me there,” Kiesel remembers.

She started breaking out in severe hives for months at a time, which she believes were triggered by the “burden of loneliness and responsibilities at that age.” Becoming responsible for an infant at such a young age came with a toll, she explained. “I sometimes picked on my brother or was quick to shove or slap his arm because I was overwhelmed and didn’t know how to handle the shrieks of a 2-year-old when I was eight.”

Eventually, at age nine, Kiesel and and her 3-year-old brother were taken in by their grandparents, but the trauma of their former living situation stayed with the children. By the time Kiesel was 14, she says she suffered from daily panic attacks, OCD, and depression. It wasn’t until she was older, she says, that she began to understand the connection between her childhood experiences and numerous chronic illnesses.

Kiesel’s story is one of what psychologists refer to as destructive parentification—a form of emotional abuse or neglect where a child becomes the caregiver to their parent or sibling. Researchers are increasingly finding that in addition to upending a child’s development, this role reversal can leave deep emotional scars well into adulthood. Many, like Kiesel, experience severe anxiety, depression, and psychological distress. Others report succumbing to eating disorders and substance abuse.

“The symptoms look similar to some extent, from cradle to grave,” said Lisa M. Hooper, a professor at the University of Louisville and prominent parentification researcher. Some of these behaviors start out in childhood, and become exacerbated in adulthood, she explains.

“Children’s distrust of their interpersonal world is one of the most destructive consequences of such a process,” writes Gregory Jurkovic in his book Lost Childhoods: The Plight of the Parentified Child.

While there is a large body of literature that focuses on the neglect children experience from their parents, there’s less examination of how this neglect puts kids in roles of parenting each other. And there is virtually no empirical research on how this affects relationship dynamics later in life—both with siblings and others. Scholars agree that there are gaps in sibling research—primarily an incomplete understanding of how these relationships and roles are affected by abusive family environments. Hooper noted that “the literature is very scarce in this area.”

In Kiesel’s case, looking after her brother as a kid has led to a tenuous and chaotic relationship with him over the years, fraught with bouts of estrangement and codependency. Though they remain close, there were periods where she and her brother didn’t speak for months at a time. “My brother is constantly on the edge of some crisis (a health crisis from his drinking, homelessness, etc.) so it is a worry that never goes completely away,” she told me in an email.

Her brother, Matthew Martin, 32, acknowledges the role their upbringing has played in these dynamics. “She was the only protector that I had,” he recalls. “My mother was a hard-core addict from very early on.” Throughout his childhood and early teens, he says he relied on Kiesel for the emotional support his mother couldn’t provide.

“We’ve had our fair share of arguments about [my addictions] and it’s hard, because she wants me to have some longevity. She wants me to be around for her the way that she was for me.”

* * *

From the age of eight until she left home at 15, Rene, who asked to be identified by her first name only because she was concerned about upsetting her family, says she would pick up her three younger siblings from daycare, bring them home, feed and bathe them, read them stories, and put them to bed. “Basically, I played the role of mother,” said the 50-year-old Oregon resident. She remembers standing on a chair as a child and cooking dinner for her entire family. In spite of the enormous burden of responsibility, she recalls it as a role she cherished. “I have really fond memories, particularly of reading them stories in bed at night.”

But Rene’s home life was far from peaceful. She says her mother’s alcoholism prevented her from properly caring for her five children, placing the task of child-rearing on the shoulders of Rene and her older brother. (Rene’s mother is no longer living.) But just as Rene took care of her younger siblings, she and her older brother relied on each other for emotional support.

“I think that it’s important to recognize that a lot of parentification is codependent,” she said, “Perhaps one sibling is the one who does the dishes and cleans the house, and takes care of the mom who is sick or drunk.” She explains that the other sibling might be the one who provides more emotional support, either by listening to problems or comforting.

Just as Wendy assumed the role of “mother” for the Lost Boys in Peter Pan, parentified siblings often forge symbiotic relationships, where they meet each others’ needs for guardians in a lot of different ways.

“We know that siblings can buffer each other from the impacts of stressful relationships with parents,” said Amy K. Nuttall, an assistant professor in human development and family studies at Michigan State University. This may account for why some parentified siblings who come from abusive homes end up maintaining close, albeit complex, bonds into adulthood, with some “continuing to attempt to fill parental needs at the expense of their own.”

Still, Nuttall adds, others may distance themselves from their families altogether in order to escape the role.

Rene found herself homeless after she was kicked out of her mother’s house when she was 15 years old. She says her siblings still blame her for leaving them behind. “When you think about it, if you’re parentified and you leave your younger siblings, it’s like having a parent abandon them,” said Rene. For years after, she was plagued by feelings of guilt—a common experience among people who have been parentified.

Sibling relationships usually generate a lifelong bond, yet for Rene, freedom from caretaking responsibilities came at a cost: the loss of her family. “I don’t have a relationship with my siblings anymore,” she says.

* * *

Unpredictable childhood trauma has long-lasting effects on the brain. Studies have shown that people with adverse childhood experiences are more likely to suffer from mental and physical health disorders, leading people to experience a chronic state of high stress reactivity. One study found that children exposed to ongoing stress released a hormone that actually shrank the size of their hippocampus, an area of the brain that processes memory, emotion, and stress management. Individuals who have experienced emotional or physical neglect by a parent are also at a greater risk of suffering from chronic illness as adults.

“Chronic, unpredictable stress is toxic when there’s no reliable adult,” said Donna Jackson Nakazawa, the author of Childhood Disrupted and a science journalist who focuses on the intersection of neuroscience and immunology.

Nakazawa has conducted extensive research on the body-brain connection, with a focus on studies initiated by physicians Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda. Their work on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) has since grown into a burgeoning field with hundreds of peer-reviewed studies. The findings show that people who experienced four categories of childhood adversity—physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, and neglect—were twice as likely to be diagnosed with cancer and depression as adults.

More links have been found between childhood stressors and adult heart disease, diabetes, migraines, and irritable bowel syndrome.

Jordan Rosenfeld, a 43-year-old author from California, attributes her own digestive issues to her childhood. When her mother was in the throes of substance abuse, she says, there were times she didn’t have food to eat. By the time she left home at 18, she began suffering from chronic pain after eating.

In adulthood, Rosenfeld noticed it was hard to regulate her emotions around hunger. “If I’m out with friends and we can’t decide on a restaurant, and I’m hungry—I can actually go into a little bit of a meltdown,” she said. “And I can trace that back to literally not having been fed as a child at various junctures.”

From an early age, Rosenfeld recalls having to remind her mother when they needed groceries and pulling her out of bed in the mornings to get to school on time. “I did a lot of that kind of parenting her, in a way, because what I was trying to do was get parented myself.” Because of this, she says she often distrusts that other people will take care of things. “That’s why I tend to step up and do it myself.”

Jordan’s mother, Florence Shields, remembers it was a depressing time in both their lives. “I had welfare for a while and I think that my diet—because of drugs and alcohol—wasn’t very good, and she probably got the brunt of that.” As a recovering alcoholic, Shields, who is now retired and lives in Petaluma, California, says she lacked the tools for parenting due to her own upbringing and history of tragedy.

When she became a mother at age 24, Shields was still grieving the loss of her older brother who died unexpectedly when she was 18. Opioids and alcohol were a way of coping with this loss, she says.“It’s like that grief is in there with you because that person is with you for the rest of your life, so when sad things come up, there he is.”

While both Rosenfeld and her mother have since attended therapy sessions together as adults, the effects of parentification continue to this day. Shields recognizes that her earlier struggles with addiction have profoundly influenced her daughter’s behavior. “Jordan is very orderly and in control,” she said by phone. When Rosenfeld’s father later remarried and had children of his own, Rosenfeld learned to project her role of caretaker onto her siblings. “I spent a lot of time babysitting them as a teenager and I think it’s been a challenge for me to separate out feeling like I’m a parent to them.”

This has often caused rifts between the siblings into adulthood, Rosenfeld says. “I’ve always been somebody who thinks it’s my job to offer help, care, and advice even when it’s not asked for.”

* * *

How does someone learn that becoming self-reliant is safer than trusting others? Nakazawa believes that in destructive parentification, “you don’t have a reliable adult to turn to.” And if a child’s early experiences at home consisted of making sure everyone else’s needs were met, then the “child doesn’t feel seen.”

This sense of responsibility and compulsive caretaking can follow them into future relationships as well. “You tend to project it onto other people in your life,” Rosenfeld says. This isn’t surprising, claims Jenny Macfie, an associate director of clinical training at the University of Tennessee and another prominent parentification researcher, as “adults who report role confusion in their childhoods may have difficulty with their identity development,” and this in turn, can affect a person’s romantic relationships.

For the first half of her marriage, Rosenfeld found herself regularly putting her partner’s needs ahead of her own—essentially mirroring her childhood role.

Others echoed this experience; Kiesel says she struggles with learning how to establish firm boundaries with partners and believes this is directly tied to caring for her brother at a young age. Similarly, Rene says finding the right balance between expectation and autonomy has been a constant problem in her relationships. She’d like to find a partner but has doubts. “It’s very easy for me to get into caretaking roles with people who basically exploit my nature.”

But these effects often go beyond the individual—studies by Nuttall and others have found that destructive parentification in a family can carry over to other generations as well. “Mothers who were overburdened by taking care of their parents during childhood have a poorer understanding of their infant’s developmental needs and limitations,” explained Nuttall. This, consequently, “leads to a parenting style that lacks warmth and sensitivity.”

* * *

As of today, there is scarce research on treatment or prevention efforts. How can a parentified sibling heal? Nakazawa believes that recognizing how these psychological puzzle pieces all fit together can be a step in the right direction. “Physically and mentally, the architecture of the brain has changed, the immune system has changed, and without that validation, you can’t begin an appropriate healing journey.”

Some people have found community through Al-Anon, a support group for the loved ones of alcoholics. “The group has a really strong focus on explaining what codependency is and offering solutions for learning new behaviors,” explained Rosenfeld. She’s attended the meetings for over a year now and says she’s noticed a tremendous change in her habits and awareness of how to set boundaries. “I’ve learned that I can’t just blame people in my life with substance abuse issues for causing me suffering; I have a choice in taking care of myself,” she says.

Despite negative outcomes associated with parentification, researchers say that going through that experience also confers some advantages that can help people later in life. Hooper believes that people who have been parentified as children possess a greater capacity for resiliency and self-efficacy. Nakazawa echoes this. “Current [American] culture thinks of resiliency as gutting it out and getting through, and one foot in front of the other,” she says. “But resiliency is learning and making meaning from what happened.”

A common thread found in people with these shared childhood experiences is a heightened sense of empathy and an ability to more closely connect to others. This is not to say that the negative impacts of their childhood are diminished, says Nakazawa, but that many are able to forge meaning out of their suffering. “People begin to see that their path to well-being must take into account the way in which trauma changed their story,” she explains, “And once they’re able to do that, they can also see how resiliency is also important in their story.”

For Kiesel, the freelance writer who cared for her brother from a young age, counseling and Al-Anon have helped her feel less personally responsible for her brother, though she laments the lack of support networks for siblings who have been parentified and have their own specific needs.

Though her relationship with her brother remains tenuous because of his addictions, she continues to look out for him by regularly calling and checking in on him every month.

Martin admits that to this day, she remains the voice of positivity and reason in his life. “I'm struggling with my own demons, but like my sister says, there is a future there for me.”

As Kiesel explains: “Our mother and grandmother died a few months apart, and our grandfather a little over a year later—so essentially, we're all we have left.”

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/10/when-kids-have-to-parent-their-siblings-it-affects-them-for-life/543975/?utm_source=feed

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ionecoffman · 7 years

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When Kids Have to Act Like Parents, It Affects Them for Life

“We’ve had our fair share of arguments about [my addictions] and it’s hard, because she wants me to have some longevity. She wants me to be around for her the way that she was for me.”

* * *

Still, Nuttall adds, others may distance themselves from their families altogether in order to escape the role.

* * *

More links have been found between childhood stressors and adult heart disease, diabetes, migraines, and irritable bowel syndrome.

* * *

For the first half of her marriage, Rosenfeld found herself regularly putting her partner’s needs ahead of her own—essentially mirroring her childhood role.

* * *

Though her relationship with her brother remains tenuous because of his addictions, she continues to look out for him by regularly calling and checking in on him every month.

Martin admits that to this day, she remains the voice of positivity and reason in his life. “I'm struggling with my own demons, but like my sister says, there is a future there for me.”

As Kiesel explains: “Our mother and grandmother died a few months apart, and our grandfather a little over a year later—so essentially, we're all we have left.”

Article source here:The Atlantic

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