But here is the thing the twenty families could not have known from her file, the thing no file could ever contain: the hard parts are not the price of the joy.

They are not a tax I pay in exchange for loving her.

They are simply part of the whole real texture of raising a whole real person, no more and no less than the hard parts of raising any child, and they are shot through, every one of them, with a joy so ordinary and so total that I would not trade a single difficult hour of it for the easiest life in the world.

The file listed the difficulties.