My girlfriend and I don’t have kids, so we hear the same comment constantly — especially from my cousin, who has four.
“Must be nice having all that free time.”
“Wow, you guys are so lucky.”
“You don’t know what tired is until you have kids.”
At first, I brushed it off. People say stuff like that all the time. But lately she’d been taking it further, making little digs whenever we saw her — like our lives were some kind of joke because we didn’t have children.
Then she started hinting that we should “help her out.”
She’d recently started dating a new guy and was bragging nonstop about the cruise they’d booked together. She kept laughing and saying things like, “I’m finally going to get a break. You two can handle the kids for a few days. It’ll be easy for you — you have so much free time!”
I thought she was kidding.
I was wrong.
One morning at exactly 7 a.m., someone started pounding on our door. Not a polite knock — the kind of knocking that makes your heart jump.
I opened it half-asleep… and froze.
All four of her kids were standing there on the doorstep.
No jackets. No backpacks. No lunchboxes. Just messy hair, red cheeks, and wide eyes like they’d been rushed out of the house. They were shivering in the cold, huddled together like little birds.
I immediately asked, “Where’s your mom?”
And without hesitation, the oldest looked up at me and said something that made my stomach drop…
