One of our kids said it. Daddy please, do something.

They weren't in the room when we argued. They didn't need to be. They felt it anyway.

My wife and I talked about separation. Privately. Not thrown out mid-fight. A real conversation.

I thought she wanted out of the marriage.

She wanted out of the cycle. Those aren't the same thing.

It took me a long time to understand the difference.

I was the loud one.

Shouting had become the default in that house. Mine most of all.

Kids learn fast. They started talking to each other the way we talked to them.

One evening, deep in it, I thought about my dad.

He used to shout too. Later in life he became the calm one. The one everyone gravitated toward without deciding to.

He passed in 2023.

Sitting in my own kitchen, years after, I wasn't wondering what he'd have made of us.

I already knew.

We didn't fix it that night. But we started asking a different question.

Not what's wrong today. Who do we actually want to be.

Two months into rebuilding my body, I came out of the bathroom one morning in my boxers.

My wife's eyes moved over me. Stopped. Came back. Then a smile.

I went and checked the scale anyway. Old habit, faster than anything I'd learned.

Zero. Same number it had shown for two months.

I got the tape measure out instead.

Eight centimetres off the waist. Over four and a half months. Scale reading exactly what it read at the start.

I wasn't failing.

I was rebuilding.