“My mother was pregnant with her seventh child… and when I refused to continue raising her children, she called the police to have me arrested as if I were a criminal.”

I felt frozen as I realized she was trying to make me look unstable and incapable of making my own decisions. It was a page torn from my school notebook that I had written at two in the morning while rocking the youngest baby, Samuel.

“Give that back to me right now,” I demanded, but my mother only smiled a cruel and triumphant smile. She asked if I wanted to hide my lies, but the female officer reached out and told her to hand over the sheet for inspection.

The officers read the page in a heavy silence that felt worse than any screaming match I had ever endured at home. The male officer looked up at me with a completely different expression, seeing me finally as a person who needed to be heard.

“Is the information written on this paper true?” he asked, ignoring my mother when she tried to interrupt with more excuses. I nodded slowly and confirmed that every word on that page was the absolute truth of my existence.

I had written that I had been the primary caregiver for years because my mother spent her days sleeping or watching television. I had also written that my father knew everything but told me I had to endure the exploitation for the sake of the family.