heirs of the mafia

The moment our lives splintered, I was barely three and my sister, Iris, a mere age of one. Our mother, in a decision as reckless as it was naive, severed ties with our father - a man who, despite his shadowy world, understood the meaning of protection. What she envisioned as an escape was, in brutal reality, a plunge into a desolate existence. Her supposed "rescue" wasn't freedom; it was a cruel abandonment into a different kind of prison.
Our mother was a hollow woman, consumed entirely by her own shallow needs and apathetic to the crumbling world around us. She was a presence, not a parent. By the age of seven, the weight of the world, and specifically our squalid, neglected home, settled squarely on my small shoulders. I became not just M's sister, but her sole guardian, her surrogate parent. I cooked, cleaned, comforted, managed - a ghost of a child performing the duties of an adult, while our mother drifted through life, oblivious.
Every ounce of my energy, every fleeting moment of my stolen childhood, was dedicated to shielding M from the harsh truths of our reality, to carve out some semblance of normalcy for her, even if it meant sacrificing any flicker of one for myself. My own life was a desolate landscape of responsibility and yearning, until, like a force of nature reclaiming what was his, our father intervened. I was fifteen, M was thirteen when he finally found us, pulling us from the wreckage of a life our mother had orchestrated and into the terrifying, yet oddly protective, embrace of his world. He didn't just 'get us'; he liberated us.