None of it felt like sacrifice, is the thing I could never explain to people who called me a saint.

It felt like the most natural thing I had ever done.

I had spent twenty-eight years not knowing what I was for.

And then one November morning I found out, on a rug, in front of a bowl of dry cereal, and I have never wondered since.

I did lose things, I won’t pretend otherwise.

I lost the motorcycle and I lost my back to that sofa and I lost, for a good many years, the ordinary freedoms of a young single man — the last-minute nights out, the money spent on nothing, the sleeping in on a Sunday, the whole careless architecture of a life that answers to no one.

Friends I’d had drifted off; it’s hard to keep up with a man who has to be home by six for a kid’s bath and can’t get a sitter he can afford.