My father denied my mother’s charges and tried to meet all her demands: cutting back his hours, coming home for supper so we could “eat together like a normal family” (although I didn’t know any other kids who had their whole family at the table for dinner), and even firing the secretary he’d had for six years because Mom was convinced the woman was out to steal him. Mom went off the deep end, and no one could figure out why. Then one afternoon I was rummaging through her drawers in search of nylons and found a four-page letter from her mother, dated six months back, spilling the secret she’d kept for nearly forty years about her husband’s affair and subsequent abandonment of my mother and her sisters. I was shocked. Mom always told me her dad had died of a heart attack when she was three; apparently that was what her mother had told her as well. But no, he’d run off—with his secretary.

I called Dad at work and told him about the letter, convinced he’d be able to fix things. He promised to talk to her once he was able to come up with a convincing reason for why he knew about her parents’ situation. But as the weeks wore on he did nothing, until finally I, armed with the wisdom of one semester of high-school-level psychology, told my mother I’d found the letter and thought maybe she was projecting her anger toward her father onto Dad, and that perhaps she needed to talk to a therapist instead of taking it out on him. She slapped me—the only time she’d ever hit me—and told me never to go through her things again, and never again to tell her what to do.

A week later she filed for divorce. A week after that my father admitted he was having an affair and moved to New York. Two months later I graduated, packed up, and moved to a university three hours south of Chicago, where I lived for four years without going home for holidays or vacations. Dad paid the bills—part of the alimony settlement—and Mom flew down to visit for a weekend every once in a while. In between classes and parties and midterms and club meetings, I worked hard to be completely self-reliant, to convince myself I didn’t need anyone else to make my life work, and to convince myself that my parents’ actions had nothing to do with me.