But there was a grief I carried alongside it.
Not a heavy grief.
Not the kind that announces itself.
The quiet kind, the kind that lives in the back of a particular drawer, the one you don’t open very often but that you know is there.
The grief was for the daughter I had not had.
I want to be careful about how I say this.
I know how it sounds.
I know it can sound ungrateful, or as if the three boys were somehow not enough, and they were always enough, they were more than enough, they were everything.
But a person can have everything and still carry a small quiet thing for the shape of what was not there.
The boys were born in 1991, 1994, and 1999.
