But you can see, can’t you, where a boy would get the idea, and how hard it would be, once he had it, to talk him out of it.

And he had been acting on it, silently, ever since.

There is a particular grief in realizing, after the fact, that your child has been parenting you.

It creeps up slowly, and it wears the disguise of helpfulness, of maturity, of a good kid pitching in, so that you can go a long time without seeing it for what it is.

But underneath the small helpful things, there had been a reversal happening in our house that I had been too tired and too grief-stricken to notice.