08/08/2026
When I was 12 years old, I rode TriMet to and from school every day.
Not because I was especially independent.
Not because my mom was trying to teach me responsibility.
It was just what needed to happen.
I wanted to go to school with my best friend, and at 12 years old, being separated from her felt like the end of the world.
My mom worked far away from our neighborhood and we didnāt have a car, so she took public transportation too.
The problem was, she couldnāt get back in time to pick up my two-year-old sister from daycare before they closed.
So I did.
Every day after school, I got on the bus and went to pick up a toddler.
At twelve.
I didnāt play sports.
I didnāt stay after school for science fair.
I didnāt join clubs.
I didnāt hang around with my friends after the final bell rang.
Because I had a kid to pick up.
Except she wasnāt my kid.
She was my sister.
I donāt remember ever thinking, āThis isnāt fair.ā
Thatās the strange thing about childhood.
Kids are incredibly good at accepting the life theyāre given.
We donāt usually have another life to compare it to.
We just learn our role.
And my role was to help.
To take care of people.
To be responsible.
To understand.
To make things easier.
I watched my brother and sister during the summers too. I was always told I would be paid for babysitting, but I never was.
Instead, my grandmother would claim she was providing the childcare so she could receive money from the state, and my mom and grandma would split it.
I was the one watching the kids.
I never saw a penny.
And even writing that now makes something in me uncomfortable.
Because thereās still this little voice that wants me to immediately explain why my mom did what she did.
She was struggling.
She didnāt have much money.
Life was hard.
She was doing the best she knew how to do.
Maybe all of those things are true.
But Iāve spent most of my life learning that someone elseās hardship does not require me to pretend mine didnāt happen.
Both things can be true.
My mother could have been struggling.
And I could have been a child carrying responsibilities that never should have belonged to me.
By the time my sister turned five, my mom had another baby and became a stay-at-home mom.
That same summer, I got pregnant.
I was 15.
I had my first son at 16.
My second at 18, shortly after I graduated high school.
Sometimes I look at that timeline now and realize something that I couldnāt have understood then:
I became a mother before I had ever really stopped being responsible for someone elseās children.
And thereās one part of this story that still gets stuck in my throat.
One month before my 13th birthday, I was hit by a car on Powell Boulevard while trying to catch the TriMet bus.
There was a settlement from the accident.
The money was put into an account until I turned 18.
By the time I could access it, I was eighteen years old with two children of my own.
I withdrew the money.
It was somewhere around $18,000.
And my mother told me that if I didnāt give it to her, she would disown me.
So I gave it to her.
All of it.
I think she gave me about $500 back.
And this is the part where I usually start defending her again.
Explaining.
Softening it.
Trying to make the story easier for other people to hear.
But I donāt want to do that anymore.
I was eighteen years old.
I had two babies.
And I was so afraid of losing my mother that I handed her nearly $18,000 that belonged to me.
Twenty-two years later, that still hurts.
Not just because of the money.
Honestly, the money is almost the smallest part of it now.
What hurts is realizing how deeply I had learned that love required me to give.
That being a good daughter meant sacrificing.
That saying no meant risking abandonment.
That other peopleās needs were always more legitimate than mine.
And that if someone I loved was angry with me, it was my responsibility to fix it.
Those beliefs didnāt disappear when I became an adult.
I carried them with me.
Into relationships.
Into motherhood.
Into friendships.
Into every situation where I made myself smaller because keeping someone else comfortable felt safer than disappointing them.
Thatās the part of healing nobody really prepares you for.
Sometimes healing isnāt discovering that the people who hurt you were monsters.
Sometimes itās much harder than that.
Sometimes you understand exactly why they became who they were.
You see their wounds.
You see their fear.
You see their survival.
And then you have to learn that understanding someone does not require you to abandon yourself for them.
I can have compassion for the woman my mother was.
And I can have compassion for the little girl I was too.
For a long time, I only knew how to do the first one.
Iām finally learning how to do both.
