I hold onto that, on the hard days, because there are hard days.

There are days I miss the mother I wish I had, which is not the same as missing the one I had.

There are days the old training fires and a voice in me says I was cruel, that I broke an old woman’s heart over comments and history, that a good daughter would have found a gentler way.

And on those days I return to the simplest fact of the whole affair, the one that cuts through all of it: in a year of accusations and lawyers and family upheaval, my mother never once asked if a single child was okay.

That is not the silence of a woman who is sorry and does not know how to say it.

It is the silence of a woman for whom the children were never the point.