It was the physical, humming evidence that the labor which had defined her recent life, the labor she had been told was her duty and the price of her dinner, was in fact not something a five-year-old was ever meant to do at all — was so far from her responsibility that a machine could simply do it, unasked, while she stood by and watched the little blue light.

I had bought the dishwasher for the obvious practical reason.

I had not anticipated what it would mean to her, that first evening, to understand that no one was ever going to lift her onto a stool again. I don’t have to stand on the stool anymore. She said it as a question because she did not yet dare to believe it was a fact.

And I knelt on that kitchen floor and made it a fact, in the plainest words I had, because the single most important thing I could give my daughter now was the same thing I would spend months giving her mother: the steady, repeated, believed-at-last assurance that the year was over, that the rules had changed, that in this house her only work was to be a child.

She watched the cycle run to the end.

Then she asked to watch it again.