“I’ve written a list,” my mother said as our session began in her therapist’s San Francisco office. “It’s called ‘the 40 most unforgivable things I’ve ever done to my daughters’.”

Fog flowed above the skylights as she fidgeted in her seat, twirling her blue chiffon scarf. I cringed. I hated the idea of therapy, but Mum loved it. She’d convinced me to go, even though I protested, telling her, “I don’t need any apologies.”

At 30, I was still frozen in fright as if I were seven years old and hiding under my bed because I feared my next beating.

I sat opposite my mom while she smoothed her light powder pink matching skirt and jacket so no wrinkles would show, as if that would somehow help in ironing out our own.

My parents, who were Russian Jewish second cousins, met at a bar mitzvah and married at 19. Mum was 20 when I was born. She got addicted to speed trying to lose the baby weight and used barbiturates to sleep. When I was seven, my parents divorced. My father moved to Mexico while my mum, sister and I remained in New York City.

Mum had been seeing her psychoanalyst weekly for decades to process her pain of having been an abuser for the first 13 years of my life. Focused only on becoming a college professor and starting my own family, I’d spent those same decades pretending I wasn’t damaged in any way. Denial protected me and I had never seen a mental health specialist.

Twenty years after she got sober, she set up this time to formally ask for forgiveness. Until then, we’d often gotten together and had perfectly pleasant times by never talking about the past.

My lower back ached as I settled into the stiff beige leather chair, wishing I wasn’t there.

The author, age 12, in front of her family's NYC apartment building.

“Today’s session is for your mum,” the therapist, Terry, said. “She wants to tell you how sorry she is about the abuse that took place when you were young. She’s been plagued with guilt.”

I looked over at my 50-year-old mother, whose hazel green eyes I had inherited along with her petite frame and dimples. I also have the same thick wavy brown hair, and perhaps the propensity to fidget, since I couldn’t stop nervously twisting a strand as she spoke that day. In every other way, though, I felt nothing like her.

“The fact that your mom is about to apologise for specific acts of violence and neglect in no way excuses her past behaviour,” Terry said.

I sat motionless and muted, staring at Mum. I knew what she was going to say and I didn’t want to hear it.

“When Leslie was 5, I repeatedly closed her in the garbage room and told her I didn’t want her anymore,” Mum read aloud. “Each time she tried to come out, I slammed the door shut and told her she was being thrown away.”

I quivered as if she were still locking me in that rubbish room in our swanky Manhattan apartment building. I shrank back to being tiny and helpless.

Mum continued,........

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