I tried to teach my nieces that there was no point thinking about shit you can’t change. That’s how I survived. If I had a bad feeling, I pushed it away and kept it moving. That was the main difference between me and my sister. Sweetie and I had the same shitty time coming up—we both went hungry, got beat, and had Mr. John touch on us—but I shoved down those memories while she chased them away getting high.
I thought if I could teach the kids to ignore their sadness, they’d be okay. But Jonelle was so little. Whenever Sweetie would show up only to vanish again, she’d cry her eyes out and start wetting the bed. Destiny would stop talking and Diamond would start acting up at school. Sometimes I wished Sweetie wouldn’t come around at all. Without her interrupting, our lives were pretty good.
Michael and I were raising six kids. Most people couldn’t handle all the noise and commotion, but I loved it. The laughing and arguing, the clothes all over the floor, the missing toothbrushes, the shoe with no match, and the never-ending list of things I had to do to make sure everybody was happy, clean, and fed, being a mama to all those babies was everything I’d ever dreamed. That’s why when Jonelle, Sweetie’s youngest, was two years old, Michael and I decided to have one more.
From the second I got pregnant, I’d never seen Michael so happy. “She’s got my nose!” he exclaimed, grinning and pointing at the screen when we went for our first ultrasound.
I looked over at the technician and rolled my eyes.
“Sir,” she said, “that’s the baby’s foot.”
Our daughter was born March 25, 1998. We named her Michaela, for her daddy. After we brought her home, all Michael wanted to do was hold her in his arms and sing K-Ci & JoJo’s “All My Life” over and over.
“You’re making me jealous,” I said one night when he wouldn’t come to bed. He just laughed and kept on singing. “I mean it!” I yelled, stomping out of the room. With all the love and affection he was pouring on that little girl, it’s a miracle I even got Michael to look my way. But I guess being a daddy put him in a baby-making mood, because eight months later, I popped up pregnant again. This time we had a boy. We named our son after his daddy, too, Michael Jr., but everybody called him Junebug.
Then we had eight; Junebug in diapers, LaDontay and Ashley in high school, and the rest of the kids filling the space in between. We put the older kids in every kind of after-school activity—track, cheerleading, football, and baseball. Ashley played viola in her high school orchestra and LaDontay was in the ROTC. I went to PTA meetings, volunteered for school field trips, and spent hours standing on the sidelines, in the sun and the rain, cheering for whichever kid was on the field.
At night I put all the kids to bed, just like June Cleaver, turning out the lights: “Good night, Ashley. Good night, LaDontay. Good night, Diamond and Destiny. ’Night, Jonelle and Michaela. Sleep tight, Nikia and Junebug. I love you!” Then I’d climb into bed beside Michael and listen to him snore like a gotdamn freight train pulling into the station.
LaDontay ran track. She was good, too. The summer after she finished eleventh grade, she was invited to a meet in Florida to qualify for the Junior Olympics. Michael and I weren’t about to let her go down there by herself, so we packed everybody into the back of our Montero Jeep, drove six hours to Orlando, and checked into the Marriott hotel. The trick to having eight kids in a single hotel room is you can’t walk in with them all at the same time. You have to send them through the lobby and past the front desk one by one, telling them to run when the clerk looks the other away.
Back then, Michael and I were both working the assembly line at General Motors. Before the trip, we did two months of overtime, scrimping and saving almost five thousand dollars between us so we could show the kids a good time. In Orlando, we took them to the beach, the movies, and the all-you-can-eat buffet. When we got home, Michael pulled out his wallet. Thirty-four dollars was all we had left. It was worth every penny. That trip was the last time we’d ever have that much fun with Sweetie’s four girls.
The older kids were at school and I was home with the babies one morning, when the phone rang. It was Sweetie on the other end of the line. I felt my heart stop when she told me why she’d called. “Rabbit,” she said, “I’m coming to get my kids.”
Sweetie had gone to family court, she explained, and filled out all the paperwork to take away my temporary custody. I guess she knew by the way I hung up on her that I’d put up a fight, because when she turned up at my house later that day, she brought along the cops.
We all crowded into the kitchen: me, Michael, Sweetie, two police officers, and Miss Campbell, who rushed right over after I called her in tears. The kids were upstairs and Michael had his hand on my shoulder, trying to keep me calm. “Why are you doing this?” I asked Sweetie. “You know you can’t take care of them.”
“They need to be with me. I’m their mama,” she said, folding her arms in front of her chest. “Besides, I got the papers. You can’t stop me.” I stared at my sister, trying to think of something to say to make her change her mind. Maybe if she knew how much work it took. It wasn’t just the times the girls were sick, or crying, or bickering with each other, stomping on my last nerve. Parenting required shit Sweetie would never even think of. Like the time I had to run to school on picture day and beg the photographer to do a group shot with four kids at once because I couldn’t pay for eight different photo packages. Or the time I had to get LaDontay a date for the ninth-grade dance. It wasn’t just any dance, it was the ROTC Military Ball. Ashley was going with our neighbor’s son, but LaDontay didn’t have a date. I was the one who saw the nice-looking boy working behind the counter at Subway and said, “You want to take my niece to the dance?” I hired a limo. I bought LaDontay and Ashley sequined dresses and had them looking like superstars when the boys came to pick them up. Sweetie would never do all that. She had her chance to be a mama to her girls. She was a fool for missing out.
“How you gonna take care of them?” I asked. “You still getting high . . .”
“Nah, Rabbit,” she said, cutting me off. “I don’t do that no more. I cleaned my shit up. I got my own place, and I want my kids.”
Looking at her standing in my kitchen, waving the custody papers in my face, all I could think of was the night I picked up her babies to come live with me. In my mind’s eye, I could still see Sweetie kneeling in the middle of her filthy living room, trying to get her daughters to give her a hug. I remembered the way the girls were covered in sores, with no shoes on their feet. I pictured little Jonelle, so tiny and helpless. In that moment I realized it didn’t matter if Sweetie swore on a stack of Bibles that she would spend the rest of her life taking care of those girls. It didn’t matter because when I looked at my sister, all I saw was Mama. That’s when I lost it.