We got on well, your mother and I. So well that she quite happily chattered on about her family and her kids when I prompted her about what a fantastic place it must have been to raise a family. She told me of your father’s impressive career as a leading geologist and that it had been hard, sometimes, to be married to a man who is more interested in rocks than in sex and conversation. This made me laugh, genuinely, and it made me wish I could laugh with my own mother like that. Yours is very different from mine, though you’ve probably already concluded that a long time ago based on what I’ve told you in our sessions. Yours is funny, a little scatter-brained, full of energy and with tons of plans for the future. She’s trusting, too trusting, but I guess that is not so strange when you’ve been married to a man more interested in rocks than sex or conversation for over forty years. Everyone needs someone to talk to, and someone to feel close to.

She told me all about your impressive and exhausted sister, both surgeon and supermom, fighting tirelessly on that battlefield of career and children. Then she told me about you.

She is, in fact, practically a hero, said your mother. She lowered her voice when she spoke of the terrible trauma you’d endured in your late teens, and of how you’d turned your life around and become a highly respected psychotherapist who contributes to international research and has made a name for herself, specifically in the field of trauma. I gently encouraged her; I know how to make people talk. She made more coffee, reassured herself that I wouldn’t speak of this to anyone, and of course I reassured her – the empty promises of a stranger. She dropped her voice as though you were there somewhere in the house and might walk in to learn of your mother telling a stranger the things you don’t even talk to your friends about. Or your husband.