My Wife Told Our Daughter to Say She’d Just Gone for Groceries — The Second Phone in the Drawer Told the Real Story
That she is a child, and children are allowed to be children, and the weight of keeping other people alive is not hers to carry.
It took months.
But slowly, I watched my daughter set the burden down.
I watched her stop tensing at Leo’s cries.
I watched her start, again, to do the ordinary things a nine-year-old is supposed to do — read her books, and roll her eyes at me, and forget entirely, for whole afternoons at a time, that her brother even existed, which is, gloriously, how it is supposed to be.
A child who forgets to worry about the baby is a child who has been given permission to be a child.
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