The first time I recall my mother mentioning Amway, we were in the car late at night, coming back from a meeting at her boss’s house. Ten years old, I’d gone upstairs to play and missed the whole point of the whiteboard sitting on an easel downstairs. My mother, however, had been rapt. Riding home with my brother and stepfather, she seemed almost to glow, as if she were throwing off sparks in the darkness.

The name Amway, she told me, was short for the “American Way.” We could sign up and buy products we already needed for the house, then sign up friends and neighbors to buy things, too. We would get rich by earning a little bit from everything they sold.

It was 1978. I didn’t realize that this was one of those moments, like Waterloo or Watergate, after which nothing would be the same. Amway—or, as we soon began to call it, the business—would become the load-bearing beam of my mother’s existence for the next four decades.

The business as then practiced in our West Virginia river town had its own culture. I found myself plunged into religious nationalism, anti-communist obsessions, denunciation of the very idea of public schools, and the worship of money. Across my lifetime, versions of these ideas would be marketed again and again to working-class Americans. Amway leaders would help elect presidents. Familiar characters from my childhood—the Amway celebrity Doug Wead, members of the DeVos family, which co-founded the company—would reappear in Republican administrations. In many ways, Amway adherents embraced a fusion of conspiratorial thinking and populism that would remain a central thread of America’s political story, prefiguring the Trump era.

But for many years, I had no context for what had swallowed my family. I had no way to understand how I’d managed to lose my mother.

Amway products began to appear around the house. We changed our laundry detergent to SA-8 and swapped our toothpaste for Glister. I rode with my mother to upline distributors’ houses to pick up the boxes that had been shipped from headquarters in Michigan. My mother and stepfather sponsored people into the business, who in turn came to our house to pick up their own orders: makeup, hair spray, a liquid soap you could use to clean anything, a portable medicine case of expensive daily vitamins called Nutrilite Double X.

My stepfather, who ran a local charity, began to introduce himself as a businessman. My mother was even more smitten with the beautiful future that Amway offered. Everywhere we went—the mall, state parks, grocery stores—she’d ask people whether they could use a little more money each month. “I’d love to set up a time to talk to you about an exciting business opportunity.” The words should have seemed suspect. Yet people almost always gave her their number. Her confidence and professionalism were reassuring, and her enthusiasm was electric, even, at first, to me. “What would you do with $1 million?” she’d ask, spinning me around the kitchen.

My mother and stepfather stayed out late on weeknights and weekends, bringing new recruits to see “the plan.” They paid to go to meetings and rallies. I had no idea at the time that these events were hosted not by corporate Amway but by high-level distributors, who were technically independent business operators. We bought books and cassette tapes by the Amway personalities Doug Wead and Dexter Yager, with titles such as Tales of the Super Rich and Becoming Rich: Eleven Principles of Material and Spiritual Success. Wead had been an evangelical minister before gaining a higher profile with Amway. Yager had sold cars and Utica Club beer before becoming one of a handful of top distributors. Their wives wrote a book together. We bought that, too.

We ended up collecting more “motivational tools” than cleaning supplies. A few people sold soap or makeup to their friends at parties, Mary Kay–style. But for us, the business mostly meant recruiting people to sign up and buy products they would use themselves, while earning points toward advancing to the next level and higher bonuses.

We became students of success, advised to set goals of a bigger house and more expensive cars, as if wishing alone could make it happen. But by this point, whatever cash we had was spent on Amway. I had a pair of bell-bottom jeans with three bright satin stripes sewn diagonally across one knee. They were the only pants I owned.

One weekend during the summer of 1980, we packed jars of peanut butter, loaves of bread, and fruit into our car, then drove 300 miles east for a rally at the Washington, D.C., Hilton. On the road, my mother and I imagined what we would do when we reached the Diamond level of the business, when true wealth would arrive.

After we checked in, my brother and I were left to our own devices, running the halls and playing in the elevators. I read a pamphlet about how John Lennon’s “Imagine” threatened America as a Christian nation, which introduced me to the (dangerous) phrase secular humanism. I listened as leading Amway distributors denounced public schools for brainwashing children.

In the hotel ballroom, distributors sang along to songs like “Rut Job Blues,” about how stupid it was to work a regular job: “I feel so D-U-M-B / I’ve got a J-O-B.” Cheers went up at any mention of Ronald Reagan, who had embraced Amway for years—and would soon be president. (A few years earlier he’d told a crowd of Amway distributors that “for me to come here and talk to you about free enterprise is like saving souls in heaven.”)

We went to more rallies—in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and other faltering Rust Belt cities where people were laid off and looking for hope. We ate up testimonials to God’s grace and to his desire that everyone should become as rich as possible. High-ranking distributors encouraged low-level distributors like us to Drop that stinkin’ thinkin’ and Fake it till you make it.

At one rally, my brother and I ran into Doug Wead’s son, who was about our age. After walking around the hotel, the three of us sat in our room and talked. I said how great it would be when our mother and stepfather became Diamonds, so we would be rich, too.

He told me I had it all wrong. His dad didn’t make serious money through Amway products. Most of what he earned came from writing books and recording talks. That was how people got rich in Amway—selling motivational books and tapes to distributors like my parents. Didn’t I know?

He spoke honestly, without malice, and the words rattled around in my brain for the rest of the trip. I picked at the upholstery on the seat of the car on the ride home. We would never be rich. There was no other plan. We were doomed.

What was it about Amway that so captured a bright, extroverted woman like my mother? Abandoned as a child when her own mother ran off to become a nightclub singer, she’d been raised by her grandparents. She graduated high school with a journalism scholarship to college, but met my father that summer and never left town. She became a stringer for the local paper, later working as a lunchtime anchor and interviewer for our local television station. When I was a preschooler, she took night classes and earned a bachelor’s degree in social work. By the time she discovered Amway, my mother had divorced and remarried. My stepfather had a more fundamentalist view of religion than I had been raised with—a view that dovetailed with many Amway leaders’ emphasis on biblical literalism and wives submitting to their husbands.

My mother couldn’t imagine life without a husband. More crucially, she believed herself destined for something extraordinary. But how could someone achieve greatness in Parkersburg, West Virginia? Amway promised to deliver what nothing else in our town could—or at least to give her a community that would pretend along with her.

For some Americans, joining the business might have been harmless. For us, it was not. Soon my mother and stepfather had no other job. Their bad decisions ricocheted in the echo chamber of Amway culture, where they were encouraged to dedicate themselves more deeply. Surely, any day now, we would make it. Within three years, we were living in a filthy house without electricity, eating food out of a cooler that we kept filled with ice. Then we were evicted, and my mother and stepfather declared bankruptcy. Ordinary people might have thought twice about sticking with Amway. But by that point, we had left the small dreams of ordinary people behind.

A few months later, we climbed in a van headed to New York to stay at another Hilton. It was New Year’s Eve. My parents went to see the Rockettes and to hear the same speakers they’d cheered on in other cities, singing songs, giving glory to God, and talking about his vision for America.

When I was a teenager and my mother was in her early 40s, she stopped talking to me about Amway. She filed for divorce from my stepfather and started a graduate-school program in behavioral psychology in hopes of becoming a therapist.

Despite being more than a decade older than her classmates, she was well liked and a good student. My brother and I had already escaped to college, thanks to cobbled-together loans, grants, and multiple part-time jobs. I didn’t talk to either of them often, because in 1988, long-distance phone calls were expensive. But my mother called one day to chat.

“Going crazy isn’t like being hit by a car,” she said in the middle of our conversation. “People make a small but conscious decision to give up. At some point, it’s easier than living in reality.”

She was deep in clinical work with the mentally ill at the time; I assumed she was drawing on that experience. Still, the line stayed with me. In recent years, I’ve wondered whether she was talking about herself, and whether there might have been some way to intervene that I didn’t see. Because, just two years later, in the last semester of her Ph.D. program, my mother decided to quit and marry a third husband, one who would do Amway with her.

Only much later would I hear stories about distributors like us who had declared bankruptcy and begin to understand how common our experience was. A 1980 study of tax returns conducted by Wisconsin’s attorney general showed that the top 1 percent of Amway distributors in that state had lost, on average, $900 in the business. In 1994, Dexter Yager and Amway faced a class-action lawsuit claiming that they had fraudulently misrepresented how much distributors were likely to earn and illegally pressured people to buy books and tapes. The case was settled with Amway promising compensation and changes that would require distributors to make clear that motivational tools were optional and didn’t guarantee success. The FTC had determined in 1979 that Amway was not a pyramid scheme, but the company continued to face allegations to the contrary. In 2010 it settled another class-action suit alleging that it operated a pyramid scheme. The company did not admit to guilt but did agree to pay plaintiffs $56 million, in the form of cash and Amway products.

In the years that followed, my mother and I would sometimes talk about real life—a birth, a death, a grandchild—and flashes of who she used to be would shine through. But she also shared long lists of people the Clintons had supposedly murdered, and continued to insist on Amway’s tremendous potential. She always sounded a little embarrassed by the things she said, as if she understood that they were hard to believe. I think she wanted me to see that she knew that the most cultlike aspects of the business were over the top, that she hadn’t been taken in entirely, that she wasn’t some kind of fool. But it didn’t matter. In the end, Amway owned her as fully as if she’d believed every word. Despite interventions my brother and I attempted, despite the money she continued to lose year after year, our mother never gave up on the business.

Illustration by Anthony Gerace

When I tell people how I grew up, I get a few different reactions. Sometimes I meet people who thought about joining Amway, and are relieved they never signed up. Sometimes they’re surprised that Amway still exists—they thought it disappeared decades ago. Most barely know what it is. And why should they? They themselves might never fall for such a hustle. But whether they know it or not, Amway has deeply influenced American politics for decades.

Amway supported Reagan’s candidacy in the 1980s. In the ’90s, a co-founder of the business, Rich DeVos, gave the GOP what was believed to be the largest-ever-recorded individual political donation. Less than a decade after I first listened to him on Amway tapes, Doug Wead became Vice President George H. W. Bush’s liaison to right-wing Christians. The Bush-era term compassionate conservatism may have been an Amway invention—Wead is said to have coined it. Dexter Yager, who had paid Reagan and Bush to speak at his events, reportedly mass-distributed voicemails pushing support for Republican candidates and accusing Bill Clinton of trying to “force the emergence of deviant lifestyles, of a socialist agenda.”

I grew up hearing rumors about the satanic influences motivating Procter & Gamble, which Amway considered a business competitor—stories that led to another lawsuit and required distributors to pay $19 million in damages. Amway didn’t invent the art of communal delusion via disinformation—the John Birch Society had already perfected it in the 1960s. The Birchers’ influence was in decline by the time we joined the business, but Amway’s culture helped carry their unhinged style into the digital era.

In 2021, Doug Wead died. At the time, he was under federal indictment—not for anything related to Amway, but for allegedly funneling Russian money into Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. In Trump’s first administration, he nominated Betsy DeVos as secretary of education. An advocate for school choice and religious education, she is married to Rich DeVos’s son, Dick, who was president of Amway himself in the 1990s, and whose family still co-owns the company. She said she’d be open to returning to the post, “with the goal of phasing out the Department of Education.” The rallies leading up to Trump’s latest election, with their euphoric resentments and tent-revival energy, recalled nothing so much as a 1980s Amway function.

My mother had fallen so deep into the delusional communities of Amway and religious extremism that I took a while to realize she was developing dementia. Her Alzheimer’s manifested in part as paranoid psychosis. Over time, as her memory failed and her sense of her own importance ballooned, she exchanged my actual childhood for one in which we’d been staggeringly wealthy. She had once been engaged to Trump, she told me. When a court-appointed attorney came to assess her legal competence, my mother threatened to have Trump fire her. For months, my mother believed she was working as Trump’s campaign director for Ohio and Michigan. They had met through Amway, of course.

It’s hard to leave a delusion behind. In the run-up to the 2024 elections, I noticed the ways in which Trump’s political followers likewise struggled to abandon him. Some prominent Trump supporters may see him as a means to wealth or power. Others find meaning and community—or even vindication—in accepting the lies he tells. Maybe, eventually, when they see what his second administration delivers, some voters will peel away.

That’s what happened with Amway. The company is still a multibillion-dollar, global enterprise, though its domestic profile is now so much smaller that it has a page on its own website answering the question: “Does Amway still exist?” In the end, more people left than stayed. Those who came to their senses or were unable to sustain the delusion eventually quit. But things can get bleak in the middle.

My mother was an outlier. As the illness devoured her mind, she stopped recognizing her friends. But she still remembered the business. At the beginning of 2020, just three weeks before the pandemic began, I brought her to live with me and my brother in Virginia. She set off the fire alarm and constantly announced that the belongings she’d misplaced had been stolen. But the hardest part was her insistence that we all inhabit her imaginary world—one where she lives in grievance and terror, a place of invented enemies.

When I cleaned out her old house for her, I found storage shelves in the basement filled with Amway binders, makeup tutorials, old catalogs, and hundreds of motivational CDs and cassettes. Like some ritual to release the dead, I emptied the binders one by one. I filled a dozen Hefty bags, and then more. When the outdoor bins could no longer contain the trash, I stacked the rest on the ground by the curb: relics that would help no one, souvenirs of a lost life.

At least the fever came on a Friday. Or at least that’s what I, an absolute fool, thought when my nine-month-old, Evan, spiked a 102-degree temperature after I picked him up from day care recently. That meant he’d have three days to recover and would be back at day care on Monday.

When the fever rose to 104 on Saturday, my husband and I grew concerned, and when it persisted on Sunday, we took him to urgent care. They diagnosed Evan with an ear infection and prescribed antibiotics, which should take “a day or two” to work, the doctor said.

Okay, fine; we would miss a day of work. Our jobs, thank God, are flexible about such things.

Except on Tuesday, Evan still had a fever. His ear infection had not gone away, and in fact had worsened to the point that he refused to eat or drink and screamed whenever he was laid down. On Wednesday, the doctor switched him to a new antibiotic. That Friday, a mere 48 hours away, I had to go record my audiobook, in a recording session that my publisher had already booked and paid for.

[Annie Lowrey: Why I can’t put down the vacuum]

Before we had Evan, my husband, Rich, and I had discussed such exigencies using Fair Play, a popular system—in the form of a book and card game—for divvying up chores. It aims to help women in heterosexual relationships, who tend to take on more household cognitive and physical labor, offload tasks onto their partner. Rich was assigned researching backup child care, for whenever our son was inevitably sick and could not attend day care.

The thing is, Rich never did research backup child care. Before people have kids, they don’t realize that parenting is like running a complex military operation in addition to holding down your regular job. He figured we wouldn’t need backup care, and because I was tired and pregnant and swamped with millions of other tasks, I didn’t do the research for him. So here we found ourselves.

Which is why, when Rich asked me, four days into Evan’s fever, as we were syringing Tylenol into his wailing mouth at 2 a.m., “What are we gonna do?” I very reasonably responded, “I don’t know, dickhead! What the fuck are we gonna do?”

I had done what the pop-feminist chore-management gurus suggested. I had tried to reduce my mental load by foisting ownership of and accountability for tasks onto my husband. The only slight hiccup in this plan is that if your husband doesn’t do the tasks, the system falls apart.

The problem, as both Fair Play’s author, Eve Rodsky, and I, and probably lots of other women, see it, is the men. Our husbands or male partners, enlightened though they may be, don’t notice what needs to be done, or they forget to do it, or they don’t know how to do it. This requires the woman to act as project manager, reminding her husband to clean the baby’s humidifier or to grab the yogurt snacks, and so on and so forth, as long as you both shall live.

In theory, Fair Play offers a good solution. The best-selling 2019 book, and its companion card deck, lay out all the chores a family could conceivably have—everything from buying birthday gifts to doing the dishes to taking out the trash—on 100 cards, which the couple is meant to divide. Though the resulting division might not quite be 50–50, it should feel equitable. Rodsky writes that the man in the relationship should take at least 21 cards. She told me that a popular way to keep track of who has which card is through the software program Trello.

Each person is to take complete “ownership” of their card, including its “conception, planning, and execution.” The same person remembers that it’s time to clean the countertops, finds the cleaning liquid, and actually uses it.

Of course, people’s definition of “clean” varies, and many women have higher standards when it comes to tidiness and caretaking. Single, childless women tend to do more housework than single, childless men. Rodsky addresses this through something called the “minimum standard of care,” or a basic level of competence for each task that both spouses agree upon in advance. This means no cramming all the Tupperware into a Jenga tower if the MSC, as it is known, calls for it to be stacked neatly. (Left mostly unresolved is what to do if you can’t agree on a minimum standard of care, or if one partner doesn’t live up to it.) You maintain this system through regular check-ins with your spouse, at which you assess how things are going and re-deal the cards if necessary.

Sure, this may sound like romance by McKinsey—a friend of mine called these chore check-ins “deeply unsexy”—but hundreds of thousands of people have bought the book or card deck. Couples seem to really need a way to talk about household labor, and Rodsky offers one.

Rodsky, a married mother of three based in Los Angeles, worked as a lawyer and philanthropic adviser before she developed Fair Play. She got the idea, she writes, when one day after she had hustled out the door with a bag of snacks, a FedEx package, a pair of kids’ shoes to be returned, and a client contract—literally with her hands full—her husband texted her, “I’m surprised you didn’t get blueberries.” She was doing so much, but apparently she should have been doing the blueberries too.

It made her realize that despite a successful career, “I was still the she-fault parent charged with doing it all, buying the blueberries and masterminding our family’s day-to-day life while my husband … was still not much more than a ‘helper.’”

For the book, she interviewed hundreds of couples and immersed herself in research about the division of household labor. She came away with a set of facts and observations that may make you want to set your bra on fire and run off to a lesbian commune. Men hate to be nagged but, Rodsky writes, when pressed in interviews, they admit that they wait for their wife to tell them what to do around the house. Countless studies show that women do much more unpaid labor—housework and child care—than men do, even when both work outside the home. Rodsky cites a study showing that after couples who claim to be egalitarian have a baby, men cut back on the amount of housework they do by five hours a week. In part because of this disparity, working women, on average, see their incomes cut in half after having children.

You may be thinking “not all men,” but it’s an awful lot of men. Several studies show that women score higher on two facets of the conscientiousness personality trait: orderliness and dutifulness. In layman’s terms, this means women like things neater than men do, on average, and they pay more attention to the rules and structure of home life.

Explanations for this phenomenon vary. It could be that women are socialized from girlhood to be cleaner and more organized, and are judged in adulthood for having a messy home more than men are. Socialization might have contributed to my own orderliness: My parents are immigrants who, from what I can tell, have never taken a gender-studies course. When I told my mom about the Fair Play system, she said, “That’s dog nonsense. Men don’t know what to do with kids. Especially your man.”

It could be that because women bear disproportionate costs of childbearing in the form of pregnancy, birth, and in many cases breastfeeding, many feel more invested. They may pay greater attention to their children, and their various needs and proclivities, than the kids’ father does. And men tend to earn more than women, so when one person’s work has to take a hit for the kids’ sake, it’s usually the woman’s. Rodsky quotes one father as saying, “I’m so proud of how well my wife balances work with her family life.” Her family life.

I heard about Fair Play during the pandemic, and I thought it could help settle the chore wars that had been simmering between Rich and me for years already. Within a few weeks, we’d read the book, bought the cards, and scheduled a weekly check-in on our Google Calendars. It worked for a while. But after I got pregnant, I suddenly felt the need to, for example, research the difference between strollers and “travel systems,” while Rich did not. We thus found it virtually impossible to play fairly for more than a few weeks at a time. After Evan was born, it didn’t seem possible at all.

To name just a few of 10,000 examples: Rich was in charge of cleaning the floors, but he forgot to do it unless I asked. We hired a cleaning lady. He forgot to pay the cleaning lady. The cleaning lady texted me to ask about getting paid. I would task him with taking Evan to a doctor appointment (which I had made), and he would forget the diaper bag. Mentally, I willed Evan to have a huge blowout in the waiting room, just to teach him a lesson.

Perhaps these are personal foibles, specific to me and my husband. But the broader system—and indeed, any system of this kind—seems like it would crumble for any couple operating under the pressures of modern life, especially if you don’t live near family.

Let’s say you’re holding the “dinner” card, but you really need help with the execution part—peeling the potatoes—because you got stuck on a work call. According to Rodsky, what you’re supposed to do in this case is ask for help from “someone in your village other than your partner.” The problem, of course, is that I, and so many other moms, don’t have a village. My parents live a flight away. Rich’s parents are dead. We have no other family nearby, and we have to drive an hour to see most of our friends. Often, I’m “assigning” Rich tasks, even if they’re technically my “job,” because I’m literally holding a crying baby and no one else is available to help.

Rodsky herself seems deeply empathetic to people who don’t have the money or time to maintain a perfectly run household. She grew up with a single mother, so financially pinched that they used trash bags as luggage. She told me that when she would go into the kitchen at night to get her disabled brother some water, she would close her eyes for a second to allow the cockroaches time to scatter off the piles of dirty dishes.

On our call, Rodsky suggested that one solution might be thinking of your village as a neighbor or even a friendly security guard at a local store—two individuals her own mother relied on for occasional help when she was a girl. But I don’t know my neighbors or my local shopkeepers well enough to do this.

Rich and I have also struggled with the minimum standard of care. At one point, Rich tried to convince me that floors don’t actually need mopping. They can just be dirty! Rodsky suggests that, in situations like these, you should “collaborate on what is reasonable within your own home,” ultimately reverting to a “reasonable person” standard from jurisprudence. But the problem is that in our home, and in many others, there is no judge or jury. We are prosecutor and defense attorney, and there’s no verdict in sight.

A recent study of the Fair Play system conducted by researchers at the University of Southern California found that the system did work—at least among the couples who actually applied it. When participants in the study completed the Fair Play program and divided the household labor more equitably, their mental health improved, their burnout decreased, and their relationship quality improved. But here’s the rub: Only about a quarter of the participants actually completed the Fair Play program. Darby Saxbe, a USC psychologist and an author of the study, told me that participants might have dropped out because they didn’t pay for or even actively seek out the program; they were offered it. Or perhaps being overwhelmed with parenting and domestic labor didn’t leave a lot of time for divvying up parenting and domestic labor. Still, Saxbe thinks the program is worth considering, especially before couples have kids. “We know domestic labor is a huge reason that a lot of women initiate divorce and separation, but we don’t have a lot of great solutions,” she told me.

Allison Daminger, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin who studies the division of household labor, told me Fair Play is the program she tends to refer people to when they tell her they’re struggling with chore management. But people who seek it out, she said, often struggle with “overload, maybe some conflict in the relationship.” These are the very things that become hurdles to doing Fair Play.

I asked Rodsky what to do if your partner just doesn’t do his cards—the issue that my husband and I keep running into. Rodsky told me this can mean that the partner who does do their cards has poor boundaries. “They haven’t really done that internal work yet to really understand what a boundary means,” she says. “What are they willing to accept?” Rodsky says that for her, setting a boundary meant telling her husband, “I’m not willing to live like that anymore.”

But I am willing to live this way. I’m not getting divorced, because there is too much work to do. Right now a helper is worse than a co-pilot, but it’s better than nothing. And, well, when we’re not screaming at each other about Clorox wipes, we do like each other.

Daminger also suggested doing some “deep work” to understand why a (hypothetical) husband (but actually mine) wasn’t doing his fair share. It could be that “you and your partner have very different underlying goals and intentions,” Daminger said. “And I think if that’s the case, then systems for dividing up tasks better are probably not going to be effective.”

[Joe Pinsker: The gender researcher’s guide to an equal marriage]

When reached for comment, Rich called this article “very good” and “delightful,” but admitted that he has “a vastly different thinking pattern around what is clean and what isn’t clean.” Then he pointed out that he, unbidden, cleans “both sides of the garbage-disposal cover.” Then we got into a fight about how often he initiates Swiffering without being asked.

The more I talked with Rodsky and Daminger, the worse I felt. I felt bad for having an imperfect husband and an imperfect life. Why didn’t I know my neighbor well enough for her to be my village? Why did I marry a sloppy guy who doesn’t Swiffer? Why did I have a baby if I don’t have good boundaries, or even a Trello account? I came away with the conclusion that Rich and I are just not very compatible in this way, and that to approach compatibility would take a whopping amount of couple’s therapy that we don’t have time for right now.

Instead, our strategy is not one that Rodsky would like. I bark out orders, and Rich kinda-sorta fulfills them, most of the time. He doesn’t understand Evan’s needs the way I do, and it would be too hard for me to explain them to him. I’m pickier and cleaner than he is, and it will probably always be this way. Rodsky referred to this kind of thinking as being “complicit in your own oppression.” I call it getting our kid to middle school in one piece.

There is another element to it, though. During that frightening, feverish week, I spent hours swabbing Evan’s forehead with a cold washcloth and, because it hurt his ears to nurse, giving him sips of breast milk from a cup—his first-ever drink from something other than a bottle. I had to admit that part of me liked cuddling him and easing his distress—even if it was technically Rich’s turn to be on duty. It was mental, emotional, and physical labor that didn’t pay and that I, on some level, enjoyed. It wasn’t fair. But life rarely is.