Someone Had to Stay
And you cannot argue someone into feeling a thing they simply do not feel.
And standing over her sleeping there in the safe dim room, I made her a different promise than the whispered ones from the waiting room, a longer one, a quieter one, meant for the years ahead rather than the frightening hour.
I promised her that she would never, not once in her whole life, have to wonder whether she was a burden.
I promised that she would never grow up in a house where her existence was treated as a stress someone had not signed up for, never absorb the poison of being made to feel that she was too much, too inconvenient, a problem to be figured out.
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