Thirty-seven years of practice made it possible to keep walking when every molecule of you wants to stop.
I want to explain who my mother is, because she is not a cartoon villain, and understanding her matters to understanding what happened that afternoon in North Carolina. Eleanor Turner was a private school administrator in Asheford, Connecticut, the kind of woman who could make a PTA committee feel underqualified just by walking into the room. She was intelligent, particular, and genuinely gifted at the performance of high standards. She threw dinner parties where every element arrived in sequence. She had opinions about how things should be done that were difficult to argue with because they were often correct in the small, measurable ways she cared about.
She simply had no framework for a daughter like me.
