I like her. I had not given myself the chance to like her before, because the false version of my situation had made the dynamic slightly adversarial, even when no adversarial thing was being said. Now that the dynamic was accurate, something relaxed that I had not known was tense.
## What Daniel and Dr. Watts Did Together
There is a particular session with Dr. Watts that Daniel described to me afterward, a session in September when I was traveling and he went alone, and which I think was significant.
Dr. Watts asked him to describe his father’s marriage to his mother. Not his parents’ marriage as he had been told about it or as he had concluded about it from the outside, but as he had actually experienced it, day to day, as a child.
Daniel said his father worked six days a week through most of his childhood. He said his mother managed everything at home — not because she was asked to but because that was the arrangement, the implicit and unquestioned arrangement. He said his father gave his mother an allowance from his paycheck, which was a thing that happened in some families in that generation, and which as a child Daniel had thought of as simply how things worked.
Dr. Watts asked what his mother did on weekdays while his father was at work.
Daniel said she managed the house, ran errands, volunteered at school, cooked dinners that were on the table when his father got home.