At 104 Degrees My Baby Was Burning Up, and the Doctor Said New Mothers Panic Over Nothing. Then My Seven-Year-Old Lifted Her Teddy Bear and Asked to Tell Him What Grandma Had Really Been Doing

He did not look at our son, and he did not look at me.

I had married Nolan seven years earlier believing I understood who he was — easygoing, agreeable, a peacemaker.

It took me most of those seven years, and this exam room, to see that what I had called agreeable was only the absence of a spine, and that a man with no spine does not stay neutral when the people around him pull in different directions.

He goes wherever the pressure is strongest.