It was staying up with a sick child and then going to work, and doing it again the next night.

It was, most of all, being present, day after day after day, for fifteen years, at every ordinary unglamorous moment of six childhoods, so that whatever else my daughters lacked, they would never lack the certainty that one parent, at least, was reliably and permanently there.

There was nothing heroic in any single piece of it.

The heroism, if there was any, was only in the not stopping, in the showing up again the next morning, and the next, and the one after that, ten thousand times, without the person who was supposed to be doing it beside me.

Chapter 7 — Tell Her She’s Welcome