My sister went to prison in 2019 and my wife and I took her two kids, and six years later I want to write the part that isn't inspiring.

The kids were four and seven. They're ten and thirteen now. We had one of our own, who was six.

My sister got sixty-two months on a charge I'm not going to describe except to say she did it and she knew she did it. She's out now, eighteen months ago, living two states away, doing well as far as I can tell.

Everyone told us we were saints. For about a year. Then people stopped mentioning it, which is actually what you want.

Here's the real version.

The first eight months were the worst thing I have ever lived through and it had nothing to do with money. The seven-year-old didn't cry. She organized. She made her little brother's lunch at seven years old and she corrected us when we did it differently, because she had been doing it, and I understand now that we took a child's job away from her and she experienced that as a loss.

The four-year-old bit. For five months. Our son got bitten eleven times in his own house and we told him to be understanding, and he was six, and I'm still not sure we had the right to ask that of him.

The money was brutal and boring. We went from three bedrooms to needing four. We refinanced in 2020 at a bad moment. Our son shared a room with his cousin for two and a half years and didn't complain, and the not-complaining is its own thing I'll be paying for later.

The confession part: for about two years I resented my sister in a way I would not have admitted. Not for the crime — for the fact that she got to be the one they missed. We did the homework and the dentist and the night terrors, and she wrote letters, and the letters were the event of the month.

I have been jealous of a woman in prison. That's the sentence.

And here's why I'm writing it anyway.

In August, the thirteen-year-old — the one who was seven, the organizer — asked if she could keep living with us. Her mom's out. Her mom wants her. And she asked me, not my wife, standing at the kitchen sink, and she said, "Is that allowed?"

I said we'd figure it out, which was the right answer and also a dodge, and then I went and sat in the garage.

We're figuring it out. It's not simple and my sister isn't a villain and that kid has two homes that both want her, which is a problem I'll take.

What I want to say to anyone standing where we stood in 2019: nobody tells you that the kids will grieve the parent who hurt them, and that you have to make room for that grief without defending yourself. That was the whole skill. It took me four years to learn it and I learned it badly.

And it was worth it. Not in a greeting-card way. In the way that the thirteen-year-old asked me a question at a sink.

Anyone else raising a sibling's kids? What did you do when the parent came back and wanted them?