I adopted my three younger sisters after our mother abandoned us – 20 years later, I received a letter from her that I should never have seen.
I was 23 when Mom left, leaving me with three baby sisters to raise. Twenty years later, my girls came to my birthday with a letter she had secretly sent them when she was 18. They had kept it from me for two years. Then they told me why Mom had made sure I should never read it.
The first time one of my sisters called me dad, I locked myself in the bathroom and cried.
Emma was barely two years old.
I had been sitting on the living room floor surrounded by plastic blocks, three training cups, and enough crushed cereal to feed a small country.
Grace was asleep against the sofa.
Sophie had somehow taken off a sock and hidden it somewhere she wouldn’t find for three weeks.
Emma climbed onto my lap, put a wooden cow in my hand and said, “Daddy, moo.”
I stopped breathing.
“That?”
She hit the cow against my chest.
“Mmm, dad.”
Grace woke up.
Sophie approached, staggering.
Within seconds, the three of them were shouting some variation of “daddy” while demanding farm animal noises.
I gave the cow to Emma.
“One second.”
Then I walked calmly towards the bathroom.
I closed the door.
I sat on the toilet lid.
And I cried with both hands covering my face.
A tiny finger appeared from under the door.
Then another one.
Then a third one.
“Daddy?”
I laughed while crying harder.
“You three are supposed to be asleep.”
They were not my daughters.
Not technically.
They were my sisters.
But life had stopped worrying about technicalities long before that.
Two years earlier, I had come home with news that was supposed to change my life.
Chicago.
A real job.
Good salary.
Benefits.
My first apartment that I didn’t share with three other guys from college and a refrigerator that permanently smelled of onions.
He had called that morning to tell Mom that he would be passing by, but he hadn’t told her why.
She had had a terrible year.
Dad had died just a few weeks after Emma, Grace, and Sophie were born.
I knew Mom was struggling.
I didn’t know he was going to leave.
***
I heard her before I got to the bedroom.
Not crying.
Cursing.
Drawers banging together.
The zipper of a suitcase fighting for its life.
At the end of the corridor, the three babies were screaming.
“Mother?”
She didn’t turn around.
He was shoving clothes into a suitcase.
“Mom…what are you doing?”
“I can’t do this anymore, Aaron.”
I laughed nervously.
“Okay. Then don’t do whatever this is.”
She stopped packing just long enough to look at me.
Her cheeks were dry, her gaze sharp as flint.
That scared me even more.
“I’ve already spent my life raising a child.”
I ran a hand over my face.
“That?”.
“I’m not going to start over with three more,” she said.
Another burst of crying came from the babies’ room.
Mom grabbed a sweater.
“I want to live while I still can.”
I stared at her.
“Those are your daughters, Mom. They are three months old.”
“I know”.
“Then stop packing.”
She zipped up the suitcase.
I followed her downstairs.
“Mom, you’re exhausted. Go to sleep. I’ll take care of it tonight.”
“No”.
“One night.”
“Aaron”.
“One day, then,” I pleaded. “We’ll call someone tomorrow. We’ll sort it out.”
He arrived at the front door.
I stood in front of her.
“Mom, please… they need you.”
Her hand tightened around the handle of the suitcase.
For a strange second, it stopped.
He looked towards the staircase.
Then me.
I remember thinking that I was about to change my mind.
For 20 years, I remembered that pause as the last piece of my mother that almost stayed.
Then he looked away.
“I’m sorry”.
He left.
I stayed at the entrance until his car disappeared.
Behind me, three babies were still crying.
***
Chicago stopped mattering before I even closed the door.
The next morning, I called the company.
The human resources woman sounded astonished.
“You haven’t even started.”
“I know”.
“We can postpone your start date.”
“I can’t move.”
“Is there an emergency?”
I looked towards the room.
Three Moseses.
Three baby bottles cooling on the counter.
A baby was screaming because apparently the other two had taken a suspiciously long break.
“Yes.” I swallowed. “There is.”
That was the end of Chicago.
People loved the phrase “he gave up”.
They said it constantly.
Nothing about becoming a father happened in an orderly fashion.
There were social workers.
Temporary arrangements.
Background checks.
Cut-off dates.
A woman asked gently, “Aaron, do you understand what it will take to raise three babies?”
Behind her, Grace spat formula down my shirt.
Emma started to cry.
Sophie joined out of solidarity.
I looked at the woman.
“They have me.”
Eventually, the temporary became permanent.
The brother became his tutor.
The guardian became the legal father.
And somehow I became a father.
***
A baby snuggled against my chest while I fed another.
Baby bottles lined up by initials.
Medicine charts were stuck to the refrigerator whenever someone got sick because the triplets apparently believed that germs were communal property.
The money stretched until it screamed.
Dating became complicated.
“What do you mean you have three children?”
“Technically they are my sisters,” I said.
That phrase never improved anything.
One woman endured three dates before asking, “So when are you getting your own life back?”
I went home that night.
Emma had a fever.
Grace was asleep wearing my baseball cap.
Sophie had drawn a purple horse directly on the refrigerator.
I cleaned the marker for 20 minutes.
I changed Emma’s sheets.
I took Grace’s hat off.
Then I called the woman and told her that we weren’t going to work out.
She had spoken about the girls as if they were something that was happening to me.
By then, they weren’t.
They were mine.
***
Our mother, Reese, never came back.
Not even for birthdays.
Not even for Christmas.
Not even when Emma broke her arm at nine years old.
Not even when Grace won a statewide essay contest.
Not even when Sophie graduated top of her class and pretended she wasn’t looking for me in the crowd until she saw me standing there.
