Breaking Barrels: Unparenting the Parent

A Caribbean Daughter’s Memoir on Caregiving, Boundaries & Choosing Herself

What happens when love becomes obligation and no one tells you how to leave without breaking yourself?

In families shaped by migration, sacrifice, and survival, love often arrives through provision.

Through what is sent.

Through what is endured.

But years later, when parents age and bodies fail, those same children. Often daughters, become the planners, the payers, the coordinators, the emotional anchors.

The container changes.

The weight does not.

In Breaking Barrels: Unparenting the Parent, Krystle Phillips delivers a raw, unflinching Caribbean caregiving memoir about boundaries, emotional labor, and the quiet erasure that happens when responsibility becomes identity.

It speaks directly to daughters of immigrants, caregivers navigating unseen labor, and anyone raised to believe that love means endurance.

This is not a story about cruelty or neglect.

It is a story about good daughters who were never taught where love ends and self begins.

With intimate honesty and sharp emotional clarity, Phillips names what so many carry in silence:

• the child chosen by default
• the guilt that travels across borders
• the exhaustion that looks like devotion
• the fear of choosing yourself too late

This book does not offer easy answers or sentimental relief. Instead, it asks the questions most caregivers are never allowed to ask:

Who am I when I stop holding everything together?
What did this love cost me?
And am I allowed to put the barrel down?

Breaking Barrels is for readers who have:

• parented before they were ready
• carried families across oceans and expectations
• confused sacrifice with worth
• felt selfish for wanting more

This is a reckoning.
A release.
A permission slip written in truth.

If you have ever felt trapped inside a role you never agreed to, this book will meet you there—
and remind you that choosing yourself is not abandonment.
It is the beginning of your return.