And you know by now that I didn’t leave him. You can judge me for that all you want. I’ve already judged myself plenty. But when you’ve been raised like I was, without real love or affection, without any kind of safety net. When you were raised without hope for any kind of future and then all of a sudden something so much bigger and brighter seems within reach, you keep reaching. Or at least that’s what I told myself. I also believed that I was a magnet for bad behavior, that maybe I deserved it because there was something deeply wrong with me. I’d been a curse for my mother. She’d never let
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