I don't know if this even counts as a confession, maybe it's just... I don't know, a thing. A thing I do. My mom, she's 78 now, and her appointments, there's always one, sometimes two a week. Physical therapy for her hip, then the heart doctor, then the memory clinic. And I'm the one taking her. Every single time. My siblings, the two older ones, they live in Dallas and Miami. My sister, she’s a lawyer, always "super busy" with some big case. My brother, he's got his own private jet for Christ's sake, flying off to golf tournaments in Scotland. I call them, I send texts, a few times I’ve sent calendar invites, you know, being organized about it. (Like that helps.) But it’s always "oh, I have a client lunch" or "I'm flying out that day, can't change it." And they’ll send her flowers, a really expensive fruit basket from some fancy place. Like that’s the same as sitting in a waiting room for an hour and a half, listening to her ask the same question five times. I live a few hundred miles away, so it's a six-hour drive each way. I have shared custody of my kids, 7 and 9. So sometimes I gotta arrange things with my ex, move days around. It’s… a lot. I'm always calling her, just to check in, sometimes I call twice a day. And every call, she’s mentioning something new that hurts, or something she forgot. And there’s this… guilt. This heavy thing. (Like a brick in my stomach.) Because I'm not there *all* the time. But even when I *am* there, driving her to the orthopedist, waiting for the results of some scan, watching her shuffle down the hall… I don’t feel much. It’s just… what I do. It’s just how it is. My sister sent me a text last week, a photo of her new boat. A YACHT, basically. And it’s just sitting there in the marina, huge, shiny. And my mom was sitting next to me in the car, on the way to the eye doctor, complaining about the price of gas, her old purse with the broken zipper on the side. I just feel… flat. I don’t get angry, not really. I don’t cry. It’s just… another Tuesday. Another three days I’ll spend on the road, another stack of medical bills I’ll help her sort through. I don't know what I'm supposed to feel, or why I don't feel it. I just do it.