Every doctor’s appointment.

Every single night any one of them was sick, because I called out, and I called out forty-one times in six years and it nearly cost me the job twice.

The things I missed: the evenings.

All of them.

Every single evening of my daughters’ childhoods, for six years, and then most evenings for four more after I moved to days in 2016 and started doing overtime instead.

What I want to say about that, and I have only got there in the last two years and it took a professional, is that the arithmetic was real and the choice inside it was also real.