The first apartment I found for us was above a laundromat.
It wasn't where I had imagined raising my children.
The rooms were small.
The heat didn't work properly.
And whenever the machines downstairs began spinning, I could feel the vibration through the floor.
At night, it sometimes sounded as though the whole building was shaking.
But the landlord agreed to let me stay with five children.
That mattered more than anything else.
I didn't have much choice.
Richard had left.
His family had turned away from us.
And I had to build some kind of life with what little I had.
The first months were exhausting.
There were diapers everywhere.
Bottles to prepare.
Clothes to wash.
Babies waking at different times.
Sometimes I had just managed to settle one child when another started crying.
I learned to move from one need to the next without stopping.
I was tired all the time.
There were mornings when I stood in the kitchen and couldn't remember when I had last slept properly.
I would look at the five little faces around me.
Then I would keep going.
I named them Daniel, Marcus, Elijah, Sophia, and Grace.
Every name mattered.
Every child mattered.
I didn't want them growing up feeling like a burden.
They were never that.
The circumstances were difficult.
The children weren't.
Daniel was quiet from the beginning.
He watched everything.
Even when the others were making noise, he could sit calmly and study what was happening around him.
Marcus was different.
He was quick to react.
If one of his siblings cried, he wanted to know why.
If another child took something from his brother or sister, Marcus would be the first to object.
Elijah was always interested in how things worked.
As soon as he could use his hands properly, he wanted to examine everything.
Toys.
Buttons.
Loose pieces of household objects.
Sometimes I found myself putting things out of reach because I knew he would try to take them apart.
Sophia was gentle.
She noticed when someone felt sad.
She offered comfort before she knew how to explain what she was doing.
And Grace asked questions.
So many questions.
She wanted reasons.
She wanted details.
If I gave her an answer that didn't satisfy her, she asked again.
I sometimes thought she had been born determined to understand the world.
Five children.
Five personalities.
One mother trying to make sure none of them felt forgotten.
Money was our greatest problem.
I couldn't afford to stay home without earning anything.
But I couldn't afford full-time childcare either.
During the day, I looked after the children.
At night, a neighbor I trusted helped watch them while I cleaned office buildings downtown.
I was grateful to her.
Without that help, I don't know how I would have managed.
I cleaned desks.
I emptied bins.
I washed floors after people had gone home.
The buildings were quiet by then.
Sometimes I would see photographs on someone's desk.
Children smiling.
Families on vacation.
Parents standing beside their sons and daughters at school events.
I tried not to stare.
Those people had lives I didn't know anything about.
But sometimes the photographs reminded me of what my own children were missing.
After finishing my cleaning work, I returned home.
Then I repaired clothing for extra money.
Buttons.
Loose seams.
Torn fabric.
Anything someone was willing to pay me to fix.
There were nights when I worked until morning.
My fingers became sore.
My back ached.
And the sound of the machines downstairs never seemed to stop.
I learned how to stretch our food.
I watched prices carefully.
I knew which stores reduced their prices near closing time.
I learned to make soup last longer than it should have.
There were days when I ate less so the children could have enough.
I didn't tell them that.
I didn't want them thinking they had taken something from me.
I was their mother.
Feeding them was my responsibility.
Still, I won't pretend I was always brave.
There were nights when I sat on the edge of my bed and cried quietly.
Sometimes I was angry at Richard.
Sometimes I was frightened.
Sometimes I wondered how different everything might have been if he had stayed.
Then I heard one of the children call for me.
And I went.
That became the rhythm of our lives.
I worked.
I came home.
I cared for them.
I worked again.
The years began passing that way.
When the children were four, Daniel asked me something I had been hoping to avoid.
We were in the apartment.
I was folding clothes.
The children were nearby.
Daniel looked up and asked why we didn't have a father living with us.
My hands stopped.
I had imagined this moment many times.
I had practiced answers in my head.
None of them sounded right when I heard the question aloud.
Marcus joined in.
He said the other children at preschool talked about their fathers.
I put down the clothes.
Then I sat on the carpet.
All five came closer.
I looked at their faces.
They deserved the truth.
But they were still so young.
“Your father left when you were babies,” I said.
Grace frowned.
“Why did he go?”
I took a moment before answering.
“He decided not to stay with us.”
Sophia looked frightened.
“Did we do something?”
I pulled her toward me.
“No, sweetheart.”
She began crying.
I held her close.
“You didn't do anything wrong.”
The others gathered around us.
I tried to make sure they all heard me.
“Sometimes adults make choices that hurt other people. That doesn't mean the people they hurt deserved it.”
Daniel looked at me.
“Did he love us?”
I remember how small his voice sounded.
That was the hardest question.
Because I didn't know the answer.
I didn't want to lie.
And I didn't want to give them another reason to feel unwanted.
So I kissed his forehead.
“I know I love you,” I said. “Every single one of you.”
It wasn't the answer he wanted.
I knew that.
But it was the truth I could give him.
Afterward, I returned to folding the laundry.
The children went back to playing.
I kept thinking about the conversation.
They were beginning to understand that our family was different from some of the families around us.
I couldn't stop them from noticing.
I could only make sure they didn't blame themselves.
As they grew, the questions changed.
Why hadn't their father visited?
Why didn't their grandmother send gifts?
Why did other children have two parents at school events?
Sometimes I explained what I could.
Sometimes I simply listened.
I never told them they had to hate Richard.
That would have been another burden.
But I didn't invent a loving father who secretly cared for them either.
I knew what he had done.
They deserved honesty.
The outside world made things harder.
When Marcus was eight, I received a call from his school.
There had been a fight.
I left what I was doing and went there.
Marcus was sitting outside the principal's office.
His face was wet with tears.
I sat beside him.
“What happened?”
He looked away.
I waited.
Finally, he told me another boy had insulted him because of his skin color.
The boy had also repeated things people said about our family.
Things about me.
Things about their father.
Marcus had pushed him.
I could see how upset he was.
“Mom, he said you weren't telling us the truth about Dad.”
I felt anger rising.
Not at Marcus.
At the idea that people who knew nothing about our lives felt free to judge my children.
I knelt in front of him.
“Look at me.”
He raised his eyes.
“There is nothing wrong with you, Marcus.”
He began crying harder.
“Nothing wrong with your brothers or sisters either.”
I held his face gently.
“You don't have to prove that you deserve to be here.”
He wrapped his arms around me.
I held him until he stopped shaking.
That evening, after all five children were asleep, I opened the box containing their birth records.
I had kept everything.
Birth certificates.
Hospital paperwork.
Insurance documents.
Letters.
Anything connected to the children.
I sat on the floor and sorted through it again.
At the bottom was a yellowed envelope.
I remembered receiving it not long after the babies were born.
Inside were photocopies of hospital forms.
Some carried Margaret Carter's signature.
I studied them carefully.
One referred to family genetic history.
Another mentioned changes involving ancestry information.
I had never understood exactly why Margaret's name appeared on those documents.
She wasn't the children's mother.
She hadn't been the one lying in that hospital bed.
And she had refused to acknowledge them.
Yet somehow she had been involved in information recorded about their family history.
I remembered asking someone at the hospital about the paperwork years earlier.
I hadn't received a clear explanation.
At the time, I was too exhausted and too worried about money to keep asking.
There were more immediate problems.
Rent.
Food.
Clothes.
Medical needs.
Five children who depended on me.
But sitting there that evening, I looked again at Margaret's signature.
I remembered her voice on the telephone.
The way she had spoken as though she already understood something I didn't.
I thought about the questions she had asked before the babies were born.
Questions about ancestry.
Questions about Richard's family history.
I placed the papers back inside the envelope.
I still didn't know what they meant.
But I couldn't make myself throw them away.
So I kept them.
The following morning, I went back to work.
That was how life continued.
Not with answers.
Not with justice.
Just with five children growing up and a mother determined to get them through each day.
Click here to continue reading: PART 3: My Five Children Made Their Childhood Dreams Come True, but the Old Hospital Envelope Kept Raising Questions I Could Not Answer
My Husband Looked at Our Five Newborn Babies and Walked Away Before I Could Understand What He Was Accusing Me Of
Part 2 of 12
