The Burden

I grew up in a house where love was handed out unevenly.

Vanessa, my sister, three years older than me, was always the family’s top priority in every decision — from expensive winter camps, to her first car the day she turned sixteen, to the money my parents quietly poured into “supporting her startup” attempt after attempt, even though none of her projects ever went anywhere.

I was different.

I paid my own way through college with scholarships and three part-time jobs at once, took out my own loans for medical school, and built my career from absolutely nothing.

My parents never stood in the way of me becoming a doctor, but they were never truly proud of it the way they were proud of Vanessa.

“You can handle it yourself, Elena,” my mother used to say, her voice light, as if it were a compliment, but I always heard something else underneath it: you don’t need anyone looking out for you.

I still remember clearly the day I graduated top of my class from medical school — the day I once thought would make my whole family proudest.

My parents arrived twenty minutes late because they’d been taking Vanessa to try on a dress for a friend’s birthday party, made it just in time to see me walk across the stage, snapped a few quick photos, then left right after because they “still had to take Vanessa to celebrate her new modeling contract.”

That night, the real celebration at home wasn’t for my medical degree — it was for a cosmetics ad contract of Vanessa’s that lasted exactly three months.

The year I was pregnant with the twins, alone, in the difficult final months complicated by preeclampsia, I called and asked my mother to come stay with me for a week to help get the nursery ready.

My mother refused, saying she needed to stay with Vanessa, who was “going through a rough patch after her breakup.”

That same year, when Vanessa came down with an ordinary case of the flu, my mother flew halfway across the country to nurse her for two straight weeks, homemade chicken soup in tow, while I drove myself to the hospital to give birth with no one beside me.