She Ordered Me to Make My Crying Newborn Be Quiet or Get Out of Her House — Three Years Later I Sat at a Playground and Watched My Daughter Shriek With Joy at the Bottom of a Slide, Loud and Free and Afraid of No One
It does not just hurt you and then let you have the clean, uncomplicated knowledge that you were hurt.
It hurts you and then immediately tells you the hurt was your imagination, until you can no longer fully trust the evidence of your own face.
I had lived inside that fog for two years — the fog where every real thing was at once fogged over by Brenda’s serene insistence that it was not real — and I had nearly lost, in it, the most basic tool a person has, which is the ability to believe what happened to them.
But that night, standing on the floor with my cheek on fire and my daughter crying, I did not waver for more than that one second.
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