The whole arrangement of a family is meant to run the other direction: the adults absorb the fear so the children don’t have to.

When it inverts — when the smallest person in the house becomes the one holding everyone else steady — it does a specific and lasting damage, because the child learns that love is a thing you earn by disappearing, by needing nothing, by being no trouble at all.

I would spend a long time afterward trying to teach my son the opposite, and I am still not certain I’ve fully undone what those years taught him.

But I know exactly when I started, and I know it started with a rule I made kneeling on my aunt’s floor.