I have a memory — I've had it my whole life — of being maybe three years old, in a crib, crying, and my mother walking past the door and not coming in. Just for a moment. Just a pause. And then walking on. I have told that memory to three therapists and dismissed it every time as something I probably made up. Sitting at that kitchen table last Tuesday, listening to my mother describe the year she could not get out of bed for more than two hours at a time, the year my father had to bring me to his mother's house three days a week because my mother "needed the quiet," I realized the memory might be real. And more than that — I realized that everything I had ever thought was true about my childhood might have been a carefully constructed story on top of a much darker one. My mother said, "You were such a good baby. Thank God you were such a good baby. I don't know what we would have done if you had been a screamer like Mary Beth." And my father — my calm, steady father — said something that shattered me.