Miller told me something in those months I have never forgotten.

She said that children of divorce are rarely damaged by the divorce itself; they are damaged by being made into a battlefield, by being asked, in a hundred spoken and unspoken ways, to choose.

The parents who wound their children are not the ones who split up.

They are the ones who make the child a weapon, a messenger, a spy, a judge.

And I decided, sitting with that crayon drawing in my hands, that whatever else I lost or won, I was not going to be that parent.