"The people who built the system were never sitting in that chair." It’s just an empty field — a small, mundane feature of a form that someone designed, probably years ago, without thinking about who would eventually be sitting in a plastic chair trying to fill it out. And yet there you are, your kid in a hospital bed next to you, nurse waiting, and the form in your hands asking for “Mother” and “Father” like it’s 1987 and as if those two options cover everyone. They don’t, and they never did.