Not the mortgage, not the maintenance, not even the money — the money was easy; I have always been good at making money.

The weight was carrying, on my own back, an entire family’s comfort and status and sense of entitlement, day after day, and receiving in return not gratitude but the steadily rising expectation of more, until finally the people I was carrying felt so entitled to the carrying that they locked me out in the rain for the crime of briefly needing to be carried myself.

A woman can hold a great deal up for a very long time.

But there is a particular kind of tired that comes from holding up people who believe your holding them up is simply their due — a tired that money cannot touch and rest cannot cure, because it is not in the body, it is in the spirit.