Small words carry weight.
## Ella’s Drawing
This is a small thing, but I want to include it.
In early August, Ella made me a drawing. This is not unusual — Ella makes drawings regularly and distributes them with the confidence of someone who knows her work is valued. But this one was specific: it was a picture of four people, labeled in her kindergarten printing: DADDY, MAMA, MAX, ELLA. And then, slightly separate but connected by a line she’d drawn in orange crayon, a fifth figure labeled AUNT LUZY.
The separate figure with the connecting line. I looked at that drawing for a while.
She had made a visual representation of what her family structure looked like to her, at six years old, after the year she’d had. Her parents. Her brother. Herself. And then her aunt, connected but distinct.
I put it on my refrigerator, in the spot that had been cleared by her other drawings going home with her when the alternating schedule settled in.
Owen saw it when he came to pick up the kids one Saturday.
“She drew your house too?” he asked.
“She drew the whole lineup,” I said.
He looked at it for a moment. “She’s got good spatial reasoning,” he said, which was his way of not saying something more direct about it.
“She does,” I said.
I left the drawing where it was.
## What I Understand Now That I Didn’t Before
Six months of unexpected caregiving teaches you things that you can’t learn from reading about it or from helping with the kids at occasional holiday dinners.