But they pool.

And after five years of that steady, patient redirection of blame, I had absorbed a belief so completely that it no longer felt like a belief at all; it felt like a fact about the weather.

My body was broken.

My body had failed us.

My body was the reason for the grief in that house.

I had stopped even resenting it, which is the most defeated a person can be — I had simply accepted my own brokenness as the settled background of my life.

And the cruelest thing about it, the thing I understood only much later, holding a healthy sleeping daughter that my supposedly broken body had made, was that none of it had ever been true.