I was a young midwife handling my first solo delivery. I was frightened, doing my best to keep my hands from shaking. The mother was barely more than a teenager herself, maybe 17 or 18.
I stood there in the rain, searching for words.
She labored for hours, growing weaker with each passing minute. In the middle of the night, she seized my wrist so tightly I can still feel the imprint of her grip.
“I can’t raise them alone,” she whispered. “And if something happens to me… promise me you’ll take care of them. Please.”
I nodded. What else was there to do?
She smiled as if I had lifted a tremendous weight from her, and an hour later she gave birth to two tiny girls, Nika and Angela. By morning, their mother was gone.
“Promise me you’ll take care of them. Please.”
My colleagues said the babies would be placed with the state.
That night, I sat at my kitchen table for a long time, thinking about a dying girl’s hand wrapped around my wrist.
Two weeks later, I began the adoption process.
I won’t say it was simple. But it was the best decision I ever made.
I never created another family. The girls were the only family I ever chose.
“I was scared,” I told them, standing in the rain outside the house they had bought together — the house they had welcomed me into because they said they wanted to care for me.
“Scared,” Nika echoed, her laugh sharp and fragile. “You let us grow up believing our father never wanted us.”
“I didn’t even know he existed until that letter arrived,” I said. “Your mother never told me anything about him. She was dying, Nika. She grabbed my hand and asked me to take care of you, and that’s all I had.”
“I didn’t even know he existed until that letter arrived.”
“But you got the letter, Jessie,” Angela said. “And you said nothing.”
Jessie. Not Mom.
“I know,” I murmured. “I know I should’ve told you.”
“She lied to us, Nika,” Angela snapped, turning to her sister as if I weren’t standing there. Then she called out to the driver. “Take everything to the old address — she knows it.”
“Girls, please…”
For illustration purposes only
The front door shut. The lock clicked, and the sound hit me square in the chest.
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