That night they fought about which movie to watch — Rhys wanting explosions, Mira holding out for a musical — talking over each other, protesting, shrieking with laughter.

I sat on the sofa and watched them make an enormous amount of noise, and I understood the thing my sister-in-law never could.

Sondra had wanted a quiet child, and she had been proud of the quiet she’d manufactured, had bragged to the relatives about how good and calm and easy her daughter was — and every adult at those tables had admired it, had wished aloud that their own children were so well-behaved, never once asking what it cost to make an eight-year-old that still.

That was the lie so deep that a whole family had swallowed it: the idea that a child’s silence is a child’s virtue, that the highest praise for a young person is that you barely notice they’re there.

It is exactly backwards.

A child’s noise is the sound of a child who feels safe.