But isn’t that what good mothers do? I was a stay-at-home mom in an age (and a town) where most of us did stay home, or only worked part-time. I’d wanted more than anything to be a mother. I wasn’t about to put my little baby in someone else’s care. Absolutely not! She was my whole purpose in life, don’t you know. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

But John didn’t get it. He didn’t see all that I did. It used to make me downright crazy when he would comment on her progress or abilities. “We had a lot of fun this afternoon,” he said one Sunday in August when he’d taken her to the beach, practically giving himself the father of the year award. “Do you know what a great swimmer she is?”

“Who do you think taught her?” I snapped. “And did you forget the sunscreen? She looks mighty pink to me.”

The same with reading. “Our four-year-old is reading chapter books!” he exclaimed, as if he was telling me something I didn’t know. Me, who spent every day with her, who read to her for hours, who gave her her love of books. I wanted him to see that, to credit me, to honor those hours, those years, when everything I did was for the good of our daughter. I was a wonderful mother. I told Juliet I loved her all the time, and that was something I never heard growing up, no sir. I was generous and thoughtful and affectionate. I set boundaries so she got enough sleep, ate nutritious meals, respected others and herself, was brave but not foolish. She was my life’s work.

And while John would give me a card on Mother’s Day and make me a breakfast that used every pot and pan in the kitchen, and tell me to “take the day off from housework” (so I could do twice as much on Monday), he just didn’t see it. Or he pretended not to. When he “babysat” Juliet so I could do exciting things like grocery shopping all by my lonesome, I’d come home to find him reading with her parked in front of the TV, watching something other than the shows I allowed (half an hour a day on weekends, nothing on school days). He didn’t notice that the house was sparkling clean, even when she was a tiny baby, because the house had always been sparkling clean, and let me tell you, it wasn’t because he knew his way around a scrub brush.

He thought Juliet had just come out a certain way, as if she raised herself.