“Oh, Mason.”
“I’m serious.”
“You have no idea what you’re doing.”
“Clearly.”
She studied me for several seconds.
Then she rolled up the sleeves of her robe.
“Go downstairs and get the clean towels from my dryer.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re about to discover what happens when three babies need changing at the exact same time.”
That was how it started.
Not with some heroic promise.
Not with music playing in the background.
Not because I was brave.
I was terrified.
But that night, I carried three infant carriers into my tiny apartment.
And somehow, none of them ever left.
The first year nearly killed me.
There is no polite way to say it.
I was awful at being a parent.
I once drove halfway to work before realizing I had put Brooke’s shoes on Lily and Lily’s jacket on Sophie.
I learned that babies could throw up farther than seemed biologically possible.
I learned that silence was more dangerous than crying.
I learned that one child getting sick meant all three would be sick within forty-eight hours.
And I learned that sleep was apparently something I had experienced in a previous lifetime.
Mrs. Coleman saved me more times than I can count.
She taught me bottles, baths, diaper rash, teething, temperatures, and the difference between a baby crying because she was hungry and crying because she was simply furious about being alive.
The girls eventually started calling her Grandma Ruth.
I never corrected them.
I needed her too.
My boss, Mr. Harlan, rearranged my schedule.
Then rearranged it again.
When daycare bills became impossible, I began working early mornings and late evenings while Mrs. Coleman watched the girls during the middle of the day.
I stopped buying anything that wasn’t necessary.
The old truck survived because it had no choice.
When the triplets turned one, I sat at my kitchen table after they fell asleep and opened a cheap spiral notebook.
I wrote:
To my girls,
Today you turned one.
I burned the pancakes, Sophie cried because Brooke touched her balloon, and Lily tried to eat wrapping paper.
I have no idea if I’m doing any of this correctly.
But I promise I’m still here tomorrow.
I closed the notebook and shoved it into the junk drawer.
The next year, I wrote another entry.
Then another.
Soon it became a habit.
Whenever I felt like I had failed them, I wrote.
Whenever something wonderful happened, I wrote.
Whenever I was afraid I wouldn’t remember how small they had once been, I wrote.
I never planned to show them.
I just needed somewhere to put everything I couldn’t say out loud.
Years passed.
The girls developed three completely different personalities despite looking enough alike to confuse every teacher they ever had.
Lily was the responsible one.
She made lists before she could spell properly and cried if she got anything lower than an A-minus.
Brooke was chaos.
At nine, she tried to build a zip line from our balcony to Mrs. Coleman’s fire escape.
At eleven, she cut her own bangs at midnight and blamed Sophie.
Sophie was quieter.
She noticed things the others didn’t.
If I came home worried about money, Sophie knew.
If I had a headache, she brought aspirin before I asked.
If I was pretending everything was fine, she usually watched me until I admitted it wasn’t.
By then, none of them called me Uncle Mason anymore.
The change happened gradually.
When they were little, it was “Uncle Mason.”
Then “Mason.”
Then one afternoon when Sophie was five, she came running out of kindergarten with a construction-paper turkey in her hand and shouted,
“Dad! Look!”
She froze.
I froze.
Her teacher smiled.
Sophie’s eyes became enormous.
“I mean—”
I crouched in front of her.
“What?”
She looked embarrassed.
“Uncle Mason.”
I swallowed.
“You can call me whatever feels right, kiddo.”
She stared at me.
Then she whispered,
“Can I call you Dad?”
I looked over at Lily and Brooke.
