My brother and I were the proof.

We were the completed version of what those comments become when no one stops them, and we had spent our whole lives being told the comments were nothing, right up until they weren’t.

I was not going to gamble a child on the hope that this time the pattern would politely stop on its own.

The pattern had a thirty-year record.

I believed the record.

I have come to think that this is the single hardest thing to make people understand, and the most important.