Three Babies, One Storm, and the Letter on the Counter
I was thirty-one the year everything broke open.
Three babies under one year old.
No partner.
No sleep.
And then a hurricane.
Let me tell you what it really meant:
I hadn’t slept more than two hours in a row since they were born. My hands were always sticky with something I couldn’t identify. I cried in the shower because it was the only place nobody needed me for five straight minutes.
Their father? Gone. He disappeared like steam off a kettle the moment I told him.
“I’m pregnant,” I said, hands shaking. “With triplets.”
He stared at me, his eyes darting like he was searching for a hidden camera.
“That’s not funny,” he said.
“I’m not joking.”
He grabbed his jacket off my couch like it had burned him. “I can’t do this. I’m not ready to be a dad. Especially not to three kids at once.”
He never turned around.
Never answered a call.
Never came back.
Most days, I didn’t have the energy to hate him. Hate takes focus, and I was running on crumbs. Between feeding schedules that never lined up, diapers that felt like an hourly tax, and three tiny humans who somehow never needed the same thing at the same time, I was just trying to keep us alive.
The house I lived in was all I had left of my parents. They died in a car accident three years before the boys were born and left me their place: a small two-bedroom with creaky floors and a porch that sagged on the left side. It wasn’t much. But it was ours.
On good evenings, I’d sit on that porch in my mom’s old rocking chair, holding whichever baby was the loudest that day. The oak trees out front turned the sunset into stained glass. I’d tell them stories about their grandparents — how my dad whistled off-key, how my mom used to sing while she cooked.
“Maybe we’ll be okay,” I’d whisper into soft baby hair. Saying it out loud made it feel slightly less like a lie.
Then the hurricane came.
The Night the Roof Let Go
The forecast said “severe weather.” The sirens said something else.
I strapped each boy into his car seat and lined them up in the narrow hallway — the most interior part of the house. I sat on the floor between them, one hand on a car seat handle, the other clamped around my phone.
“Please,” I whispered, to God, to the storm, to my parents, to anyone listening. “Please let the roof hold.”
It didn’t.
I heard it before I saw it. A long, tearing crack, like the sky was being unzipped. Then water. Cold, relentless water crashing through my bedroom ceiling. The smell of wet insulation and broken wood flooded the house.
The boys screamed.
I wanted to.
Instead, I started singing.
It was an old lullaby my mom used to hum when the power went out. My voice shook, but I sang it anyway. If everything was going to fall apart, I didn’t want the last sound my sons heard to be my fear.
By morning, half the roof was gone. The bedroom was a wreck of dangling boards and soggy drywall. The house that used to smell like baby lotion and warm formula now reeked of wet wood and something darker — mold beginning, maybe. Rot, definitely.
Someone from the government came by days later, walking the street with a clipboard and a strained smile. Paperwork, questions, a sympathetic nod. Eventually, an envelope.
The check was for $800.
My neighbor — whose fence was also missing — said repairs would cost at least $10,000.
I stood in what used to be my living room, holding the check, surrounded by ruined furniture and ruined walls, with three babies fussing in their seats. I laughed. It sounded sharp and wrong in the empty space.
“What are you going to do?” my best friend Jenna asked. She’d driven over as soon as the roads were cleared, stepping around branches and shards of glass.
“I don’t know,” I said. Something in me cracked open so wide it felt like there was nothing left to hold. “For now… we’ve got the shelter.”
I didn’t mean it as hope. I meant it as a fact. The lowest rung on the ladder was the only one still standing.
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