I did not sleep, that first night.

I sat up in the dark after the girls were finally down, in the sudden enormous silence of a house that had that morning held two parents and now held one, and I did the arithmetic of what my life had just become.

Six daughters.

A thirteen-year-old, an eight-year-old, five-year-old triplets, and a baby who could not yet sit up on her own.

One income, and it was not the larger one.