Anyone can see a woman with ruined knees and understand that she has been wronged.

It is harder to see the other injury, the one they had done to her sense of what she was even allowed to ask for.

They had taken a mother’s deepest instinct, the instinct to protect her child from worry, from cost, from any burden, and they had turned it into the very thing that kept her trapped.

Every day she stayed silent to spare me, she sank a little deeper.

Every sacrifice she made in the name of keeping the family together bound her tighter to the people destroying her.