You could have covered up, like you always used to.

Now every family photo looks damaged.” “Gwen!” I shouted, but she rolled right over me.

“Oh, stop babying her,” she snapped.

“The world is cruel.

Better she hears it from family than finds out the hard way.

No one wants to look at that on Instagram.” And my daughter, my brave daughter who had walked out onto a beach with her whole self showing for the first time in her life, covered her mouth with her hand, and a sob escaped anyway.

I have rarely in my life felt a rage as pure as the one I felt in that moment, watching my sister take a sledgehammer to the thing my child had spent sixteen years building the courage to feel.