But the strain of these efforts left me feeling like an imposter, like a poor facsimile of my mother, the woman who had tried to protect us with everything is fine. On that night my father found me, drunk, alone in the family room, when he said, Vince, this isn’t you, I couldn’t tell him how right he was. I couldn’t tell him how exhausted I’d become hiding from pain. But pain finds its way. We try, but we can’t stop the pooling, how trauma saturates.
