Anger is an emotion I don’t really understand, so when I saw it coming at me in the form of my own child, a part of me withdrew.

I was raised with unquestioning deference to authority and although I’ve known that was wrong for decades, I was not ready to deal with the way being loving can take away people's desire to be respectful to you.

Also, some broken part of me made me question if he wasn’t the way he was because of the kind of weakness within me that my father always told me I had.