I adopted three daughters in 2022 after many years of fostering them. Their biological father — we call him Papa — is incarcerated for an armed robbery he committed while in the throes of addiction. He's been in prison since before his youngest girl was born.
We Lacantors were as endangered as the Latin language we’d taken our name from; Laca for lake and cantor for singer. Unless we recruited another, we would lack quorum for our solstice ceremony and the extinction of our kind would follow.
On a searing July day in 2018, I picked up my former foster daughters. In the year since they had been reunified with their birth family, my husband and I frequently visited them or helped with childcare.
"Never forget that another family has to fall irreparably apart for your family to come together."
According to my mother, my older brother believed in Santa Claus for “too long.”
