I remember thinking that I was just doing my duty. That’s what we called it in the corps, you know. Just doing your duty. No matter how many push-ups, no matter how many miles, no matter how many nights shivering in a foxhole. You just did it. And that’s how I felt about those evenings, after school. The practice, the homework, then coming home to the younger ones… always hungry. Always needing something. My older siblings, well, they were GONE. Out with friends, out with girlfriends, out doing whatever it was teenagers did back then that was so much more IMPORTANT than making sure the littlest ones had enough protein. I remember once, I asked my brother, “Are you coming home for dinner?” And he just laughed. Said something about having plans. Said I was a good kid for looking after them. A PAT ON THE HEAD. That’s what it felt like. So I’d just… do it. Every night. Make whatever I could find. Mac and cheese, sometimes scrambled eggs if we had them. Not exactly gourmet, but it filled their little bellies. And they’d eat it, so fast, like they were starved. And then they’d look at me, with those big, trusting eyes, and say, “Thank you, sister.” And that was it. That was my reward. Not praise from the parents, who were always so busy, always so tired. Just the quiet gratitude of little children. I never thought about it then as a BURDEN. It was just life. The way things were. But looking back now, through the filter of seventy-six years, I see it differently. I see the little girl, exhausted, trying to manage a household that wasn’t hers to manage. The COMPULSION to care, to provide, to make sure no one went without, even if it meant I went without myself. A kind of proto-martyrdom, perhaps. Or maybe just a deep-seated, untreated anxiety, manifesting as extreme conscientiousness. There’s a part of me that still longs for those nights, oddly enough. The quiet hum of the refrigerator, the clatter of forks on plates, the low murmur of little voices. A kind of order I rarely found elsewhere. But then I remember the aching fatigue, the constant dull hunger in my own stomach, the resentment that festered just beneath the surface, waiting for a crack to show. And I wonder if it was truly devotion… or just a profound, pervasive sense of being utterly alone. It’s hard to tell now. The past is a country you can’t quite visit, not truly.