My mom likes to say I was born angry. It’s usually something she brings up during holiday meals or to her latest boyfriend, inevitably followed by a tittering laugh, as if it’s everything you needed to know about me. And I always pretend not to hear, even as the comment stokes my ever-present annoyance—which, now that I think about it, might prove her point a little.

But honestly, is anyone born angry? Terrified, yes. Who wouldn’t be? Thrust into a cold, unforgiving world only to be weighed and probed and manhandled by strangers? There’s a reason we all emerge screaming. The first few moments of being a person are horrifying. Still, no one comes out mad about it. Mostly because we haven’t learned that being scared and vulnerable are things we can even be mad about. That comes later. Anger comes from experience.

The first time I remember being truly angry was at my mother’s third wedding. That’s not to say there was anything wrong with the wedding itself; of all her ceremonies it was probably my favorite. Her fiancé, Larry Huffman, paid for us to fly first class from Minneapolis to Cancún, where he and my mom exchanged vows on a white-sand beach at sunset. The night before, at the rehearsal dinner, he even let me order a virgin strawberry daiquiri with one of those little paper umbrellas, which, for a ten-year-old girl with trust issues, was a very big step.

No, the anger came the next day, after I watched my mom walk barefoot down the makeshift aisle on the beach. The sun was setting behind a gauzy veil of pink and orange clouds, sending soft rays of light off the Swarovski crystals in her hair, while a guitarist played Canon in D nearby. And when she reached Larry, smiling so brightly that her rose-colored blush creased along her cheeks, I couldn’t help but smile, too. The moment was perfect. The epitome of what love was supposed to look like, what romance ought to be.