The world is not made for mothers. Yet mothers made the world. The world is not made for children. Yet children are the future. Or so I’ve seen on posters at pediatric offices. Pro-life campaigns. PBS maybe. When I was in school, we spent our lunch hour foreheads pressed to the table while a small twitchy principal bellowed into a megaphone for silence. This was before the internet and secret viral videos and conscious parenting. He and the lunch ladies swatted at us but never hit. I don’t remember telling you about it. I’m sure it seemed irrelevant to me at that time in my life, meaning my entire childhood, when all we cared about was surviving my father. My head on the cool table, solemnly eating Tater Tots, probably seemed like heaven.

Do you get Tater Tots where you are?

Now I’m the mother of Nova and Lark, seven-year-old girl, three-year-old boy, and I sense I’m coming to something important. Or rather, something important is coming to me. It will serve us both to bear witness. The world is not made for us—certainly it’s not; just try to afford preschool—but this thing I’m starting to understand, transforming from felt to known, it’s about the energy of violence. The way violence shrinks women, makes us feel lucky for things that aren’t lucky. Even when we think we’ve outrun it, look back—see its long reaching fingers touching every choice we’ve made.

For many years, despite all I’d seen and all I’d survived, I thought I had evaded those long fingers. That life was about wise choices. For instance, if I did motherhood differently than you, if I ensured a peaceful family life, then I could leave the past behind. No. Not just behind. I could annihilate it.