I turned her face into my shoulder for exactly that reason, to give her one less thing to carry.

You cannot protect a child from everything.

But you can choose, in the worst moments, where to put your body and which way to turn their eyes, and sometimes that is the whole of what love can do, and you do it.

I made that turn without deciding to, the way you throw an arm across the passenger seat when you brake too hard, an instinct older than thought.

And I have come to believe that most of real parenting lives in exactly those unthought instants — not in the philosophies we hold or the plans we make, but in which way we happen to turn a child’s face when the world shows its worst, and whether, when the moment comes, our body chooses them before it chooses anything else.