By the time my husband graduated from medical school I had spent eight years paying for it. On the lawn afterward his mother took the flowers out of my hands, he pushed an envelope into them, and I opened it standing in front of eighty people.

I did not have a day off — a real one, where I was not either working or catching up on the household — between the March of the first year and a Tuesday in the fourth year when I had a temperature of a hundred and two and physically could not stand up.

I made about fifty-one thousand dollars a year at the peak of that arrangement. I have the returns.

Here is what it went on: rent, the car, insurance, his exam registrations, his board prep course, four thousand one hundred dollars for a rotation away from home in the third year, and the tuition gap, which ran between six and eleven thousand dollars a year depending on what his aid package did.

I have all of it. Every transfer. That turned out to matter enormously and I did not keep it for that reason. I kept it because I have kept a spreadsheet since I was twenty-two.