They Were About to Split Up Five Kids Under Seven. The One Man Willing to Take All Five Knew Exactly What That Does to a Child

That surprised me.

I’d braced for dramatic breakthroughs, tearful cinematic moments, and instead the real progress came in things so small I almost missed them.

The morning the second-youngest stopped hiding food in his pockets, because some animal part of him had finally accepted there’d be lunch.

The night one of the girls called out “Bernard?” from her room just to check I was still in the house, and then, a few weeks later, called out the same word but slower, testing it, and it came out “Dad?” — and I stood in the hallway and couldn’t answer for a second.

The first time all five of them laughed at the same thing at the same table, this big ragged unplanned laugh, and I realized I was hearing the sound of children who had, somewhere along the way, stopped waiting for the next bad thing.