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And then there were tihtened ht, trying to sleep in the hard white porcelain tub, just as my ed In the days after,the house to soh she’d done so and needed to pay penance

“You’re the nice one,”of the world, and her way of expressing herself in English, were simple I was the nice one My ood one My middle sister was the bad one Even at the tinations were harmful ones, to both my middle sister and me, but it was how my mother saw the world

“You’ll see,” my mother told me “It’s better to be nice than sest source of unhappiness, her oorst enemy”

My e mix of childishness and wisdom that I’ve never fully understood She confided in me often, whether I wanted the closeness or not Her words, though hurtful to , in that my sister’s behavior see herself Where before my family had been undone by my father’s teure of fear Myabout the situation

After my father departed,afloat with her job responsibilities We rarely had food at hoe nearly ee juice, and fruit She raised us as though ere tiny adults, already fully capable of figuring out e needed to know She did this out of necessity, I think, lacking the bandwidth to do more than try to survive the requirements of her work, so she could provide for us le parent tasked with raising children—because of her undiagnosed decline, it cost her extra effort to pass at work, to pass as functional in everyday life

We ate daily from the box of ramen, or “lahmyen,” as my mother considered the correct pronunciation, kept in our living roo it into chunks in a metal bowl after school My father, on brief visits hory over this nutritional choice, even as he’d always left the feeding of us to ain

My sister often started screa at my mother over the lack of necessities like food, to which , which she would always ruin My sister see any understanding of the difficulties she faced

There was no constancy to my mother’s behavior She was reliably unreliable, even if the ways in which she couldn’t be depended on fluctuated over tiot stranded in places from which she’d promised to pick me up She didn’t attend any aspect of my life, school-related or social, unless it was related to , and so, even though I didn’t want to play piano or classical instruments, she insisted on music for me Once I could drive, she occasionally attended my music concerts with me, even as she was reliably absent from any other parentally attended events I wasn’t surprised later in life, when I read that nitive disorders like Alzheimer’s—I saw this play out in real time with my mother, as she calmed dohenever she sat nearby as I played piano, often specifically because she asked me to play for her “Play for me, play for me,” she asked me, as she sat expectantly on the floor

She didn’t care for sports, and so sports faded froement of my athletics Myout for the, too, and since no one else noticed anything rong, I didn’t question why I failed to recognize peers’ faces until they ithin arth, or why I couldn’t read the names, written in black marker, on white strips of tape on others’ shorts

“Call out the na to,” our coaches told us, in sumh I ht, I only saw a blur I had no one I could talk to about such things—my mother didn’t listen when I tried to talk to her abouther own—and so tiht life simply was this blurry

With neurocognitive disorders and mental illness, someone often does need to stand in, in terms of capability, and to pretend otherwise is to di, as well as the real tolls of an individual’s i in forher needs, and trying to fulfill the my constant alertness was needed, due to their unpredictable nature

In the King Soopers parking lot she began panicking as the car kept skidding forward, seely of its own volition, after she parked I reached over and slid the gearshift into Park, quickly, quickly In theand she froze, helpless—she didn’t realize she’d forgotten to put the car in Park before turning off the engine These sorts of tinythat haunted me I felt a responsibility to ilance over all the small details of everyday life These sorts ofto h school and on She relied on me to take over for as much as I could on her behalf, so she could be absolved of the responsibility