When My Ex-Husband Brought His Young Mistress to Our Son’s Pool Party to Humiliate Me, I Introduced Everyone to My Handsome New “Boyfriend” — He Laughed and Called It Pathetic, Certain I’d Hired an Actor, Until the Man Opened a Small Case and Said One Sentence That Drained the Color From His Face

And Luke had just, without knowing, handed me a reason to dig it back up.

I think often, now, about how thoroughly I had let that competence be buried, and about how ordinary the burying was — how it happened not through any single act of suppression but through a thousand small reasonable-sounding choices, most of which I made myself.

When Theo’s older infancy loomed, it made sense for one of us to step back, and I earned less than Luke on paper, so it made sense that it was me.

When I stepped back, it made sense to let my certifications lapse, since I wasn’t using them.