Mine was the only one I had.

When the person who defines love for you is also the person who hurts you, the hurt does not read as a violation of love; it reads as part of its definition.

You do not conclude that your mother is cruel.

You conclude that love is like this — watchful, conditional, enforced — because she is the one who taught you the word.

I carried that definition into my adult life without ever inspecting it, the way you carry an accent.

It shaped who I married and how I flinched and what I expected from the people I loved, and I called all of it my personality, because I had no idea it was a wound.