Thanks. It wasn’t the worst thing she did, but it was particularly crystallizing.

I’ve done a lot of work on healing from it since. I’ve got a kid now, and it’s been healing to live every day in a way that shows that you totally can just love your kid and not have to treat them like that.

No.

I might, if what they did were severe enough, express that what they did is disappointing. But that’s different from branding them with the iron of disappointment-as-identity. Everyone does stuff sometimes that is worse than they aspire to be. The trick is coming back from it, learning and growing and changing.

I remember how it felt the day I asked my mom, after she had screamed at me and hit me a bunch for stuff she made up about me, “what did I ever do to you to make you hate me this much?”, and she screamed back “YOU WERE BORN!” And I believed she meant it, because none of this was out of character.

I was 12.

No kid should ever feel the hopelessness and abandonment I felt in that moment.

See, the thing Jim Crow and its “literacy tests” taught us is that you just need a rule that you can enforce on the wrong people, and then you just choose not to enforce it when it’s convenient.

States’ rights and all, y’know. Like the right to ban federal gestapo kidnappings.