Before I Become a Parent, I Must Forgive My Childhood

By the time the sun rose on my twenty-ninth birthday, I realized I had spent nearly three decades trying to forget the echoes of my childhood—when in fact, they had been following me, quietly, patiently, like shadows that never needed light to exist.

I wasn’t planning on becoming a parent soon. But life, with all its ironic poetry, had a way of making us prepare long before the call arrived.

It started with a smell—a whiff of soap my ...