My wife left me with our six daughters for a wealthy man. Fifteen years later she texted to say she’d be at our oldest daughter’s wedding — and my daughter told me to let her come, because she had already prepared a special welcome for her.

Every one of those six girls has worked since she was fifteen and not one of them was asked to. That is not a thing I am proud of, exactly. It is just what happened in that house.

The third is the part nobody asks about, which is what it did to me.

I did not date. Not once, in fifteen years. People assume that was devotion and it was not; it was arithmetic. There was no evening in which it was possible.

Somewhere around year seven I stopped being a man who was getting through a rough patch and became a man whose entire self was a logistics operation for six other people, and when Bess left for school two years ago I sat in that house on a Thursday night with nothing to do and did not know what to do with my hands.

I am still working that part out. It is not a complaint. But I want it in here, because these accounts always make the father sound like a saint, and I was not a saint. I was a man running a schedule, and I was frequently short-tempered, and I missed things that mattered because I was asleep at eleven in the morning.