The Standing She Did Not Know She Had

She needed one look at my face and the baby’s, and she was already all the way in.

There is a kind of love that asks you to explain yourself first, that wants the evidence and the fairness and both sides before it will commit, and there is a kind that simply arrives, inside out sweatshirt and all, and stands between you and the weather.

I had spent nine years inside the first kind without fully realizing it — a marriage, and a marriage’s family, where my worth was always provisional, always under quiet review, always something I had to keep earning by being pleasant and grateful and small.

Brigid’s love was the other kind, and I had somehow forgotten, over those nine years, that the other kind existed.