Stray: Memoir of a Runaway

by Tanya Marquardt

But when confronted with a need that contradicted hers, or with emotional turmoil that she couldn’t control, she shut off.

All it took were these small acts of kindness for me to forgive him. I held him to a lower standard, expected much less from him because he demanded that we accept his unpredictability.

When you’re just thinking about surviving, when you’ve been abused and berated, hurt as a child before you even had the language to describe the hurt like I had, you come to believe that the world is a traumatic place, without respite.