I ADOPTED MY THREE BABY SISTERS AFTER OUR MOTHER ABANDONED US — 20 years later, they handed me a letter from her I was never meant to see.
I was twenty-three when my whole life changed in the space of a single afternoon.
I’d just finished college that spring, and a job offer in Chicago was waiting for me — the kind of offer I’d spent four years working toward, the kind you don’t turn down without a very good reason.
I came home early that day specifically to tell my mother I’d gotten it.
Instead, I heard her screaming before I even made it through the front door.
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She was stuffing clothes into a suitcase when I found her, moving fast, sloppy, nothing folded the way she usually insisted on folding things. Down the hall, my three baby sisters — three months old, all three of them born the same spring — were crying in their cribs, the kind of crying that had clearly been going on for a while.
“Mom,” I said. “What are you doing?”
She kept packing.
“I can’t do this anymore, Micah.”
She looked up at me then, and something in her face had already gone somewhere I couldn’t reach.
“I already spent my whole life raising one child,” she said. “I’m not starting over with three more. I want to live while I still can.”
I followed her downstairs, my heart going faster than I could keep up with, begging her to slow down, to sit for one minute, to give me even a single day before doing something we couldn’t undo.
She opened the front door anyway.
“Mom, please,” I said. “They need you.”
