And it was that quiet, overlooked, unglamorous power that saved us, when the loud kind collapsed.

I think there is a lesson in that which the world works hard to hide from people in my mother’s position, and it is this: you are never truly powerless, even when the loud people hold all the visible power, because there is always some quiet thing you can still do, some small persistent true act available to you, and if you do it faithfully enough, for long enough, it can outlast and undo the whole roaring empire that never bothered to notice you.

My mother could not stop my father.

She could not out-money him or out-lawyer him or out-shout him.

So she did not try.

She for ten years simply kept a true record of what he was doing, in the one form available to her, and waited; and when his empire finally fell, hers was the hand that had kept the one thing that mattered.