I refuse to pretend otherwise, because the story people want is a woman who was miserable for a decade and did not notice, and I was not miserable.

I had a child I liked enormously, a practice that grew from me alone to eleven people, a father down the road, and a husband who was a genuinely excellent father to a small boy — patient, physical, present in a way a lot of men that age are not.

The shift happened somewhere between 2019 and 2021 and I can date the outside edges of it but not the middle.

My father died in September 2019.