Not one dramatic renunciation.

Just eleven years of a thing being third on the list, and then fourth, and then not on it.

I want to be careful about how I put this, because the way this part of the story usually gets told is that the divorce gave me back my art, and that is a tidy lie.

The divorce did not give me anything.

What happened is that for the first time since I was twenty-three, there was no second adult in my house whose comfort was a standing item on my agenda, and it turned out that this had been consuming an amount of my attention that I could not have measured while it was happening.