I remember once, during basic, they had us doing some drill in the desert, sun baking the sand till it shimmered like warped glass. We were all dehydrated, hallucinating maybe, and I saw a mirage of my mother, just standing there, offering a canteen. Even then, the part of my brain that still worked – the part not entirely convinced I was dying – knew it was a trick. A cruel joke. That’s what it feels like sometimes, watching these young ones. The boy, all gangly limbs and wide eyes, asking for juice, then a story, then a ride to practice. The girl, a little whirlwind of questions and scraped knees. They’re good kids, mostly. But there’s a certain kind of exhaustion that settles in your bones when you’ve been on perpetual watch for decades, and it’s not the physical kind. It’s the kind that makes your mind feel like a radio dial stuck between stations, all static and half-heard voices. My own kids, the older ones, they’re like distant satellites. Sometimes, if the atmospheric conditions are just right, I might catch a faint signal. A text message. A fleeting voicemail. But mostly, they orbit their own lives, oblivious to the gravitational pull of a family that still needs tending. I wonder if they’ve simply forgotten the coordinates, or if they’ve deliberately set their trajectory away from this particular solar system. It used to make me angry, a low simmer that would bubble up in my chest like a faulty pressure cooker. Now, it’s more of a dull ache, like an old injury that flares up with a change in the weather. I used to be able to predict the shifts in the wind, the subtle changes in pressure before a storm. Now, I just brace myself for whatever comes, and try to keep these two little ships afloat. My therapist – a rather earnest young man with a perpetually surprised expression, like he’d just discovered the internal combustion engine – once tried to explain something about “vicarious traumatization.” I just nodded, picturing all the small wounds, the daily skirmishes, the constant vigilance. It's like I’m still on watch, scanning the perimeter, only the enemy is just… life. And all these years later, I’m still the one pulling double duty, covering for the platoons that never show up. Sometimes I catch my reflection in the window at 2 AM, the blue glow of this phone illuminating the deep creases around my eyes, and I think, *Jesus, Martha, you’re still at it?* And then the boy coughs in his sleep, a small, innocent sound, and I just… stay awake. Just in case.