For months — for the better part of a year — I had been the voice in my daughter’s ear telling her to endure it. Give your father a chance, Maya. Don’t turn every house rule into a battle. Patricia has a right to set boundaries in her own home too, sweetheart. I had said those things gently, reasonably, in what I believed was her best interest, and I had believed I was being a good and fair and mature co-parent.

And what I had actually been doing, every time, was taking the abuser’s side against my own child, in her own hearing, and teaching her, one reasonable sentence at a time, that the adult she trusted most in the world would not stand between her and the ones who were hurting her.

I have had to sit with that, and I am not going to soften it here, because softening it would be a way of letting myself off, and I have not earned that.

I was so desperate to be the reasonable ex-wife — so afraid of being the bitter, difficult, vindictive woman that Richard had always accused me of being — that I bent myself, and bent Maya, around the goal of not causing trouble.

And my daughter learned the lesson I was accidentally teaching.

She learned that complaining to Mom got her a lecture about giving Dad a chance.