We’d spread a blanket on the living-room floor, go easy on the discount syrup, and let the laughing turn poverty into a tradition, which is a trick I recommend to anyone: a thing you can’t afford to escape, you can sometimes afford to make sacred instead.

Sadie was in charge of flipping. Maisie was in charge of announcing whose pancake was the most beautiful, a title she awarded with the gravity of a judge.

Caleb was in charge of eating an unsustainable amount of syrup and being stopped.

Slowly, over a lot of Fridays, I watched my oldest stop guarding and start playing — watched her, one week, actually forget to check the lock — and I marked it privately as the biggest victory of the whole year, bigger than any courtroom.

Meanwhile, Grant was demanding equal custody — and, at the same time, repeatedly missing his scheduled calls and showing up late to exchanges, so that his demands and his behavior kept contradicting each other in ways a court could see.

A court-appointed evaluator, Dr. Hannah Pierce, visited both homes and asked, in a dozen careful ways, the same underlying question: who actually runs these children’s lives?