Single Dad

My eldest niece is graduating this week. It is simply amazing to me how time passes. I'm having a difficult time reconciling this grown-up with the tow headed little toddler that was here just a minute ago.

Apie is going to be eighteen in a few months. She'll be graduated from high school and beginning college in the fall. She's made it this far with very few bumps along the road; no more than teenage melodrama and failing math. We are so lucky and we know it.

You see my brother is a single dad. He has raised the girls nearly on his own most of their lives.

The nicest thing I can say about their mother is that she has mental illness. Everything else is R-rated. She was married to Brother Dear for about four years. She had two young boys that my brother raised as his own at the time. (to give you a hint of who she is: their names are Stormy and Smokey. I am not kidding.)

She left my brother for someone less viable and took all of the kids, severing any contact between my brother and the boys and using the girls as pawns. Brother Dear often went for weeks with seeing - or even knowing where were - his girls.

One day we got a call from him "I have the girls." With no warning, no preparation, nothing, Satan just handed them over. She signed off custody rights and went truck driving to the deep South with her boyfriend du jour.

Apie was four and Ambie was two. Brother Dear hardly knew Ambie because he'd spent such little time with her. And the boys? Gone, sent back to their paternal grandmother even though Brother Dear offered to take them as well.

Oh the girls were a mess. I called them The Wild Things. Uncut and ratted hair that had to be cut short in order to salvage. Bad teeth, poor hygiene, little social skills. They had apparently been raised by wolves. Apie was a "little mother" as she had been in charge of Ambie for so long that she didn't even think about it. That was one of our biggest struggles with her: making her realize that she was a kid and not a mom.

Brother Dear tucked and rolled. He switched shifts at Boeing. He got insurance for them and hooked them up with all the right doctors. Apie had glasses and eventually braces while Ambie skimmed by with just having some baby teeth removed and some digestive issues that she grew out of. He took time off to get them enrolled in proper schools and get them caught up. He let them spend time with their grandparents whom they barely knew.

And now. Now!

They live in a house they own and never have to move until they marry or want to. They've gone to the same schools. They're both in choir and band and sports and clubs and church and the list goes on and on. Things happen for a reason.

Brother Dear knows their friends, knows their teachers, he is not the perfect dad but he's trying. He learned to be a dad as they learned to be daughters. He is the first one they run to when things go wrong. He bought Apie a car and he's helping pay for college. Apie wants to be a psychologist. While Ambie is a freshman in the Fall and the fun really beings. Our Melodrama Queen. She's going to give us a run for our money fo sho.

But I'm not worried really because apparently there's nothing Brother Dear can't handle. He's a single Dad of teenage girls. You can't scare him.