Lowell’s distance, his continent, his inability to sit still in a quiet house.

We had built entire adult selves on top of that childhood without ever looking at the foundation, and now we were down in the foundation with a flashlight, naming things. That is not who you are, the therapist kept saying. That is what you learned in order to survive who she was. It took me a long time to believe her.

It is a peculiar grief, learning that some of the traits you thought were you were only scar tissue.

But there was a gift buried inside that grief, and it took me most of a year to find it.

If the flinching was not me — if the carefulness and the appeasing and the constant vigilance were scar tissue and not soul — then there was a me underneath all of it that I had never actually met.

That was the strange, hopeful thing the therapy kept turning up.