You Are My Daughter

And it had taken my husband, kneeling on a cold floor, to show me that.

Because a child working to understand adult cruelty is a child being taught something they should never have had to learn, which is that the people who are supposed to love you sometimes choose, on purpose, to hurt you, and that there is nothing you can do about it.

That lesson steals something from a child that is very hard to give back.

It teaches them to be watchful, to brace, to hold themselves a little apart, to expect the cooling that comes with their turn.