I spent seven years raising the ten children my late fiancee left behind, believing grief was the worst thing our family had survived. Then my eldest daughter looked at me and said she was finally ready to tell me what really happened that night, and everything I thought I knew shattered. By seven that morning, I had already burned one batch of toast, signed three permission slips, found Sophie’s left shoe in the freezer, and told Jason and Evan that a spoon wasn’t a weapon.
I’m 44 now, and for the last seven years, I’ve been a father to ten kids who weren’t biologically mine.
“Dad!” Katie yelled from the hallway. “Sophie says my braid looks like a mop!”
I looked up from packing lunches.
“That’s because Sophie is nine and a menace.”
Sophie appeared in the kitchen doorway, cereal bowl in hand. “I didn’t say mop.
I said tired mop.”
***
Calla was supposed to be my wife.
Seven years ago, she was the center of our loud, crowded house, the one who could calm a toddler with a song and stop a fight with one look. Mara had been eleven that night, barefoot on the side of a road, shaking so hard she could barely stand. The police found Calla’s car by the river: driver’s door open, purse inside, and coat left on the railing above the water.
They found Mara hours later, walking along the road, her face blank, her hands blue with cold.
She didn’t speak for weeks. When she finally did, she said the same thing every time.
They searched for Calla for ten days. We buried Calla without a body, and I was left with ten kids who needed me more than I knew.
“You’re staring at the peanut butter,” Mara said now.
“Am I?”
I looked down at the knife in my hand. “That’s never a good sign, huh?”
She gave me a smile and reached past me for the bread. “You want me to finish those?”
“What I want,” I said, “is one normal morning before somebody sets a backpack on fire.”
From the hallway, Jason yelled, “That happened one time!”
“And it was enough,” I yelled back.
Mara shook her head, but there was something tired in her face that never used to be there.
People said I was insane for fighting for those kids in court. My brother said, “Loving them is one thing.
Raising ten kids alone is another.”
But I couldn’t let them lose the only other parent figure they had. So I learned how to do everything by myself: hair braiding, trimming boys’ hair, lunch rotations, inhalers, and how to tackle nightmares.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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