I’m sure my mother thought I was crying because her yelling upset me, and it did. My mother didn’t curse much, almost never in fact, but she could reduce a grown man to tears without profanity when she was mad. It didn’t take much for her to go from zero to furious. But it wasn’t the yelling alone that made the tears fall. It was confirmation of what I thought I truly was—dirty, nasty, and used up.
