So I sent a notice on the eleventh of October and the special meeting was held on the sixteenth of December, and it took eleven minutes, and it was conducted by video, and my mother did not attend.

Eleven minutes, and eleven weeks of waiting for them.

And I have thought about those eleven weeks a great deal, because they are the most instructive thing that happened to me that year.

I spent them furious.

I spent them drafting letters I did not send and rehearsing a meeting my mother did not come to.

And in the middle of them — on the ninth of November, in Sharon Bellweather’s office — I missed a Family Court return date because I was on a call about the special meeting notice, and it adjourned the paternity petition by five weeks.

Five weeks of my daughters not having a legal father, because I wanted a board seat back from a woman who was seventy-four and had already lost.