“He’s sweet when he’s sober,” she said.

Not quite knowing how to respond, I told her about Dave.

When I was a sophomore in college, I was hanging out in my friend’s dorm. There were seven of us, and we were all talking, smoking a bowl, and I forget how it came up, but suddenly there were stories. I was horrified by the stories, by how we all had them, every one of us. Compared to what some of them had endured, to what Mia had endured, what I’d gone through wasn’t even that bad.

That’s what I told myself. It wasn’t that bad.

It was another excuse to not give myself permission to be upset. To dismiss it.

“Therapy helps,” one of my friends said.

It took me another few years to see a therapist. I was too busy with school and side jobs and internships and then working full-time. When I finally got around to going, I was twenty-four and more motivated by the fact that everyone I knew had a therapist than thinking I actually needed the help. I thought I’d vent about office politics and subway manspreading.

I liked my therapist. Her name was Stella; she was soft-spoken and compassionate and she wore wooden jewelry. Before I knew it, I was telling her about my past, about my mother, about how I had been raised. When I started saying these things out loud, that’s when I realized how fucked-up it all was.

She recommended books. Books about being the child of immature parents, about healing from trauma. It gave me all this perspective I didn’t know what to do with.

And it hatched this anger. There was suddenly so much of it. Too much.

I didn’t know how to experience it. I didn’t know how to hold it, where to put it.

When you’re sad, you cry. When you’re happy, you smile, you laugh. But what do you do when you’re angry? Not just mad, but filled with this ugly, consuming rage?

And the thing is, women aren’t allowed to be angry. Nobody likes a mad woman. They’re crazy, irrational, obnoxious, shrill.

I did what I could to control it. After about six months, I stopped going to therapy and stopped answering my mother’s phone calls, her texts. I’ve done my best to avoid her the past two years, because she sets me off.

“Will you talk to me?” she asks. “Please?”

What kills me is this isn’t for me. The conversation she’s begging me for isn’t for my benefit; it’s for hers. She wants to be absolved of all guilt without admitting any wrongdoing. What I want is for her to apologize and take responsibility. I’m not going to get what I want. I know this. So any conversation would only exacerbate my anger.

“No,” I say. “I’m not going to talk to you about it, Mom. It’s not a conversation I want to have. We’re not having it.”

The rest of the drive is just her sobbing into the passenger-side window.