By the time I was in kindergarten, I had learned to wash my family’s dishes, scrubbing the bathtub in the second grade, and by the third grade I began rocking my infant siblings to sleep. Rocking them late into the night while my father worked the night shift and my mother got the rest she needed. Despite this, it was not until during my mother’s seventh pregnancy that I learned what it is like to be a mother at twelve years old and the true definition of responsibility.
It began one night, about a month into my eighth grade year. We were all in my mother’s large room having just finished our nightly routine of praying and reading the Bible. My mother, who had been ill earlier that day when I had come back from school, was now laying on the
