Yesterday’s testimony of Lee Anthony in the murder trial of his sister explained a great deal to me about the family’s interpersonal relationships—or, rather, I should say more precisely, inspired my writer-me to add a dimension or two to my Casey-Anthony-look-alike character.

Having toyed with my character’s family overnight, I have now decided that she should have an older brother who also lives in their parents’ home after graduating from high school and who lives in the home when my character becomes pregnant.

In my novel’s plot line, the brother would be the first in the household to notice she was pregnant—sometime in her late-sixth month. It took him this long to notice, because he spent little time with his family. He has serious conflicts with his parents. They often criticize him for “not getting a life,” while at the same time demanding that he contribute to the household budget and act as “the man of the house” when his father abandons them for other women—as he does from time to time.

I don’t mean that in my novel the mother literally says any of these things to her son. Instead she implies these obligations. Mothers have ways of saying things without ever saying them—saying multiple, contradictory things.

All his life, my character’s brother has felt responsible for his little sister. He feels this way to this day. When he realized she was pregnant he “confronted” his mother with the fact. Her response was not only dismissive, she told him in no uncertain terms to butt out. For almost three months, as his sister’s belly grew and grew, his parents gave him the cold shoulder, refused to discuss the impending “big event” and treated him as a non-person. He came and went. He spent as little time in the house as he could—and that little time was primarily at night in his bedroom.

A few days before my character gives birth, her brother raises the issue one last time. His mother completely shuts him out. He understands that he isn’t even welcome in the hospital after his niece is born.

No one else in the family comments. The mother-son relationship is too well known.

But, you say, isn’t this unrealistic? Incomprehensible? Improbable?

No, I reply. It is the well-known psychological phenomenon of “parentizing” of children. In an unhealthy household, parents and children are often co-dependent. The parents demand, in effect, that one or more of their children take care of them instead of the other way around. The children, though, are entirely dependent upon their parents and cannot act in loco parentis (a legal term that means “in place of parents”). As a result, the victimized children lose all self-esteem; they know they are incompetent to do what their parents want them to do. They learn to feel more and more responsible for their parents and siblings.

Because my character’s parents have always been “over-the-top,” immature people, they really never wanted to have children. They had children only to fulfill society’s expectations of them. They would have preferred to remain footloose and fancy free forever. When their first child was a boy, naturally they said they were “thrilled.” When their second child was a girl, naturally they said they were “thrilled.” But the first thing they did after the birth of my character was to make it clear to the boy that as the older brother it was his job to “watch out for his little sister.”

And that’s what he tried to do all his life.

So, when he discovered that my character was pregnant “out of wedlock,” he knew his parents would blame him for not taking adequate care of her. Furthermore, he actually felt that he had let her down in some big way.

My character, though, is secretly glad that her pregnancy has caused her mother to get angry at her older brother. She always thought that her mother preferred him to her—she thought that was why her mother never gave her any love, that is, that her mother expended all her love elsewhere.

I’m still working on the complexities of this fictional family’s relationships. I think I will probably develop a backstory in which brother and sister are extremely close in childhood, best friends, in fact. At some point they “play doctor” or my character’s brother says, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” My character will participate in these normal games, but subconsciously something will fester in her like an infection. She will feel deeply guilty about these games and the feelings they engender in her. I’m not sure why yet: either it will be because of her mother’s rather prudish attitude toward sexuality or her open resentment of her husband’s extramarital affairs, or it will be because of her father’s sexual abuse of her—or maybe all of the above.