She grew up watching me apologize for myself. Not in words — I never said, apologetically, here is my modest job and my modest house and my modest life. But in manner. In the way I would minimize my work around people whose work sounded more important. In the way I managed conversations at Paige’s school events with parents whose lives looked different from ours. I was not ashamed of my life, but I was careful with it in ways that Paige absorbed as something to be careful about.
Carl was the same. He was proud of his work, genuinely, but he was also aware of how it registered in rooms where other fathers were doctors and architects. He had learned to make himself small in those rooms, and Paige had watched him do it, and she had decided that smallness was not a thing she was willing to practice.
The decision she made was: I will make myself large enough that there is no room to be made small.
She made herself large by editing out the things that could make her small. And eventually she edited me out entirely.
I am not excusing this. But I am saying that the roots of it were partly in me, and partly in Carl, and partly in the class dynamics of a particular American childhood that I did not author but did participate in. When I say I understand it, I mean it all the way down — not as a defense of her, but as an honest accounting of how we got here.