Every filmmaker knows that the most powerful moments in a movie often result from the excision of just two or three frames. The audience never realizes that you once had those two or three vanished frames at your disposal. They understand only that they're being affected by what's up on the screen. This aesthetic carried over into my fiction. Words are spooky objects.
Nobody really knows how they work.
It helps that I'm a slow reader. I think maybe I have a mild form of dyslexia. Whatever one may think of The New Yorker type of story, it certainly scans, which is more than I can say for most genre fiction. I'm glad you noticed the responsibility theme. To fulfill your responsibility to a child, you first have to become an adult.