I didn’t want to be a family that sat around the dinner table, talking about the paths not taken or what might have been. I didn’t want to someday have to tell my daughters that there had been a time when their dad might have become president—that he’d had the faith of a lot of people and the courage to try to do something enormous, but that I’d jettisoned the possibility, pretending it was for everyone’s good when, really, I was protecting my own comfort with how things were, my interest in staying put.
