But I will name it plainly, because naming it plainly is the whole point, and the refusal to name it plainly is how it survived for so long.

My mother controlled her children’s bodies.

She decided what we were allowed to eat and punished us when she judged we had eaten too much.

She used exercise as discipline and discipline as cover.

And when she felt defied, she used a belt.

She did all of this while calling it love, and structure, and “raising us right,” and she said, often, that she was doing it because the world was cruel to soft people and she would not let us be soft.