I picked up Katie, who was still crying, and I sat on the floor with my back against the crib and held her. My mother put Mia in my other arm without saying anything, and the four of us sat there in a nursery with yellow walls.
I didn’t resist it. I let all of it hit at once.
The sweaters were still tucked under my arm. I set them on the floor beside me. The white flowers were downstairs, where I had dropped them.
My mother put her hand over mine and did not speak.
I don’t know how long we were there.
I let all of it hit at once.
At some point, both girls quieted. They had cried themselves into a still, heavy kind of sleep, and now they were just warm weight against my chest.
I looked at their faces in the yellow light of the nursery, and I made them a promise out loud, even though they couldn’t understand a single word of it: “You are not going anywhere, sweethearts. Neither am I.”
***
The next three years were the most demanding and the most defining of my life.
My mother moved in for the first year. We developed a rhythm. I learned to move through the world differently than I had before, and in the process of adapting, I started sketching something I had been thinking about since the first week of my rehabilitation.
“You are not going anywhere, sweethearts. Neither am I.”
The joint mechanism in my prosthesis was functional but inefficient. The prosthetic worked, but not well enough. It hurt and slowed me down. So I started fixing it.
I had ideas about how to reduce the friction, and I sketched them at the kitchen table after the twins were in bed, on whatever paper was available, in whatever spare hour the evening gave me.
I filed the patent alone. I found a manufacturing partner who understood what I was building. The first prototype worked better than I had expected. The second one was the one that mattered.
I signed the contract with a company that specialized in adaptive technology, and I did not announce it, did not give interviews, and did not post about it anywhere. I had two daughters who needed their father present and a business to build, and I had no interest in being a story that other people told about themselves.
I found a manufacturing partner who understood what I was building.
