We share his last name.

And today, three women with college degrees would like the whole world to know exactly who built them.”

I have thought a great deal, since, about that word she chose — built. Not raised, not loved, though both would have been true. Built. As though they understood themselves to be, in some real structural sense, made of the things I had done, assembled out of the late nights and the shown-up-anyway and the crooked braids, the way a house is made of the labor that went into it.

And I think that is exactly right, and I think it is the truest thing anyone has ever said about what a parent is.

You are not the person a child came from.

Any accident of biology can manage that; my brother managed it.