I heard a challenge to my judgment, and my judgment was the thing I was most defensive about, precisely because I was old enough to have begun, privately, to doubt it. I’m sixty-three years old, Genevieve.

I know how to run my own life. I hear that sentence now and I am ashamed of every word, because what it really meant was: do not make me consider that I might be wrong, because I am frightened of being wrong, because if I am wrong about this I am alone again.

My pride was not strength.

It was a shield I was holding up against my own fear, and my daughter’s warnings kept knocking against it, and so I came to experience her love as an assault on my peace, and I punished her for it, a little at a time, until she learned to stop.

That is the quiet way a parent teaches a child not to save them.