It’s hard for me to remember what I hoped to become as an adult. To think back on my childhood aspirations now, I would be looking through the filter of everything I have experienced in life.

I have memory images of being a child, but as much as I feel I relate to, or wish I relate to the childhood version of me, I’m superimposing the subsequent decades over that memory.

What I remember best is right now, and I wonder if I even have this right.

The summer I turned seven and the summer I turned nine, I was sent to the home of an angry aunt and uncle, because my parents were overseas.

I do not know, nor can I imagine, how this particular aunt and uncle were selected to care for my brother and me.

I told my cousin I wish the adult me could have cared for the child me. It was one of those things I said in a chat without really thinking about it. Once I said it, it really got to me.

If I had a time machine, that is what I would most like to do. Go back and care for the child that I was.