"My mother is no longer the terror or trouble she used to be to my younger self. 

I have come to see her small suicides, her death-defying leaps, her dragging her sons into the depths, her tragedies and triumphs in ways that only years of loving and living can help me interpret.”

"I share this because I talk with so many who carry intense childhood adversity, and my hope is that this quote offers something to hold onto: what once looked like ruin can, in time, be recognized as a woman swimming as hard as she knew how, in water she never chose to enter. 

That understanding doesn't excuse the depths a mother may pull her child into — but it can be the difference between drowning in them and finally coming up for air. If you are still there, in the cold of your own childhood, know this: understanding does not require forgetting, and peace does not require pretending. It only asks that you keep living long enough to see the whole shape of the story — and to write, at last, your own ending."