The Role My Parents Never Expected: Raising My Sister’s Kids

My parents put off suing for custody of my sister’s children for a long time.

Shy and artistic, my sister was a straight-A student who played soccer in college. It wasn’t clear what came first — the drugs or the depression or the terrible men — but when she dropped out in 2011 as a freshman and spiraled into addiction, having four babies in less than two years, her dissolution was shocking. We’d known, vaguely, that the disease ran in the family — my grandmother warned that most of her 11 siblings dealt with substance abuse. But we had never seen the fallout up close.

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For years, my parents held out hope that my sister would get clean or sign over custody willingly. My dad often said, “The idea of shaming my daughter, of standing in a courtroom and listing all the ways she’s failed as a mother, makes me feel physically sick.”

But eventually it sank in that nothing was changing. My sister, L, was 30. The older two children were 8 and 7. The twins were 6. They had been living with my parents for nearly five years. It was time. So when L was reachable — stuck in jail for a few months in 2023 — they served her the papers.

On the day of the hearing last year, my sister and her children’s father showed up to the courthouse in Winston-Salem, N.C. Each was physically present, anyway. The father, a man more than 20 years my sister’s senior, seemed high and slept through most of the proceedings. My sister was alert, if strung out, casual and modest in a sundress and a jean jacket.

My parents presented their case to the judge, the primary facts being that L hadn’t lived with her children for years and had been in and out of jail for a decade. She had left or been kicked out of so many treatment programs that it was hard to keep track of how many — eight, maybe, including private and state rehabs.