Chapter 8: Steady Days text
Steady days rebuilt what spectacle could not.
Harper’s therapy continued on a schedule that did not revolve around adult convenience. I transported her when the plan assigned me that role, waited in lobbies with coffee that went cold, and returned her without pumping her for session content. What she offered voluntarily, I received. What stayed in the room with the therapist stayed there.
At the park she ran harder than she had in the first weeks. At the table she argued about vegetables with ordinary childhood stubbornness. Once she cried because a pencil broke, not because a threat lived in the walls. I treated the pencil crisis with the seriousness it deserved and replaced it. Trauma work, I had learned in the ER and relearned here, included allowing small problems to be only small.
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Clara’s motions for expanded access came and went. Some were denied. Some were set for review after parenting capacity evaluations she delayed. My attorney kept me informed without feeding me hope or rage. I used the same muscle I used on long trauma shifts: attend to the next indicated step, not to the entire war.
Colleagues at the hospital who knew only that I was in a custody-adjacent situation covered a shift when court ran late. I paid them back in kind. Work remained the place where pain had protocols and silence was something we investigated rather than obeyed.
