I ADOPTED MY THREE BABY SISTERS AFTER OUR MOTHER ABAN:DONED US — 20 years later, they handed me a letter from her I was never meant to see.

I never felt that way, not once, not even in the hardest years. Every time I looked at those three small faces, giving anything up never once crossed my mind as the right way to describe what I was doing.

I learned things in those first two years that no twenty-three-year-old expects to learn all at once. How to hold one crying baby while bottle-feeding another. How to sleep sitting upright in a hallway chair, angled so I could see all three cribs at once during the worst of the sick nights. How to stretch a single paycheck so thin it nearly tore, and somehow still keep three kids fed, clothed, and current on every doctor’s appointment.

I worked nights for years so I could handle daycare drop-offs and pickups myself. I stopped dating almost entirely, not out of bitterness, just because there wasn’t room left in a day that already ran from five in the morning until whenever the last of them finally fell asleep.

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