He said, "I resented you for the first eighteen months. I'm not proud of it. But you were not Mary Beth. And I kept looking at you and thinking, she was ours, and you are somebody else's child, and we took you because we couldn't bear the quiet. And I had to work through that. I worked through it alone, because your mother couldn't help me, and I couldn't tell her. And by the time you were two, I loved you so much it broke the other thing in half. But if you are asking me whether, in our darkest moments, your mother and I have wondered whether we should have waited — yes. We have wondered. And that is not because we regret you. That is because we regret the parents we were to you in the beginning, when we should have been grieving instead of parenting." I sat at that table and I realized I had spent my whole life looking at my parents as if they had only ever been my parents. I had never once thought of them as people who existed before me.