That is the plain word for it, and I will not dress it up, because it does not need dressing up: she was healthy, and she was happy, and she was growing at her own good pace in her own good way, and every single day she did something she had not been able to do the day before.

That very morning, her physical therapist had finished a session on the living-room mat and had spent ten minutes telling me, with genuine delight, about the progress Maya was making in her balance and her motor skills, the small hard-won victories of a child learning to command her own body.

I listened to every word.

I had become, over those six months, a connoisseur of my daughter’s smallest advances, a man who could be moved to quiet tears by the sight of her transferring a block from one hand to the other, because I understood, as the twenty families never had, that there is nothing small about a child becoming more fully herself.

Maya sat on her mat in the sunlight and babbled to her toys, and I watched her, and I thought, as I thought a hundred times a day, that I had very nearly driven home from that diner and written a check.