My father heard the whole of it through the walls for eighteen years and turned up the television, and told us, when we were old enough to ask, that discipline was your mother’s department.

Here is the thing about growing up inside that: you do not experience it as abuse.

You experience it as weather.

It is simply the climate you were born into, the set of rules the world runs on, and children are geniuses at adapting to the climate they are given.

So I adapted.

I learned the reasonable voice and the appeasing laugh.