When Ethan pushed that baby away in the delivery room, he thought, in his panic, that he was declining a burden.

What he was truly doing was refusing to be someone’s home, which is the one thing a parent is fundamentally for.

And when Lauren opened her arms on that couch, she was not simply accepting a child.

She was declaring herself, permanently and unconditionally, to be the place where this child would always belong, no matter what her spine required or what her care would cost or what storms her family walked through.

She was being a home.