One week I was a surgeon making post-shift visits to a patient.

Some number of weeks later I was a woman whose day did not feel complete without a text about cherries, and I could not have told you when the change occurred.

And I have come to believe that this is how real families actually form, unlike the kind I had almost married into — not through grand ceremonies and formal declarations and the machinery of weddings, but through the slow, unremarkable accumulation of ordinary days spent genuinely caring about one another’s small business.

My wedding to Andrew was going to be an enormous, expensive, public declaration of a family that did not, underneath the declaration, actually exist — a form with no substance, a ceremony performing a bond that was never really there.