My mother had not lost her temper with her grandchildren one Christmas.

She had spent decades believing, sincerely and without a flicker of doubt, that she had the right to control children’s bodies through shame and pain, and calling that belief discipline, and being handed one set of children after another to practice it on — her students, then her own, and now, very nearly, ours.

The comment over the cookie tray was not a beginning.

It was the latest instance of the oldest thing about her.

And once I could see the whole shape of it, the decision that had felt so enormous — cutting off my own mother — became the simplest thing in the world.

I was careful, through all of it, and I want that on the record too, because it matters to me and it mattered to the truth.