I did not do it.

I kept my hands at my sides, and I want to be honest that it was one of the hardest things I have ever done, harder than anything that came after.

And I did not do it not because I am gentle, and not because I forgave anything, but because in the same instant that the rage rose, a colder and clearer part of me spoke underneath it, and what it said was this: If you hit them, you become the story.

If you hit them, they get to be the victims.

If you hit them, you give them exactly the weapon they will use against you, and you lower yourself to the thing they are, and worst of all, you spend the seconds your daughter needs you on a satisfaction that will not help her at all. So I did not touch them.

I turned away from the two adults entirely, and I did the only thing that actually mattered, which was to get to my child.

I have thought about that choice more than any other I made that whole terrible season, because it is the one people find hardest to understand, and because it is the one that saved everything.

People hear this story and, at the point where I describe not hitting them, some of them are almost disappointed — they wanted the catharsis, the flung table, the mother-in-law in the cake, the satisfying image of cruelty answered in kind.

I understand the impulse completely; I felt it in my own arms.

But I have come to believe that the impulse is a trap, and that the whole culture’s appetite for it — the revenge fantasy, the moment of glorious retaliation — leads people, again and again, into ruining their own real chance at justice for the sake of a moment’s satisfaction.

Because here is the truth about hitting them, that the fantasy leaves out: it would have felt wonderful for about four seconds, and then it would have cost me my daughter.

It would have turned a clean case of child abuse into a messy case of mutual assault.

It would have given a courtroom a mother with her own violence on the record.

It would have let them do the thing they are experts at, which is to make themselves the victims, to point at my temper, to say see, she’s unstable, she’s the dangerous one. The retaliation I wanted so badly was precisely the gift they needed from me, and every instinct screaming at me to give it to them was, in effect, an instinct working on their behalf.