I learned to eat carefully and apologize by reflex and read a room for danger before I read it for anything else.

And when I grew up and left and built a life, I packed all of it into a box labeled “strict upbringing” and set the box in the back of a closet and did not open it, because opening it would have required me to call my mother something I was not yet willing to call her.

This is the part that people who did not grow up in such a house find hardest to understand, and I did not understand it either until a therapist named it for me much later.

They ask the reasonable outsider’s question: how could you not know?

How could a grown, intelligent woman fail to see that what happened to her was abuse?

And the answer is that a child does not have anything to compare her childhood to.