I’m standing with One hundred people, mostly women, on the Pawcatuck Bridge in Westerly, RI, holding clever signs and cheering when drivers honk their horns in pro-choice solidarity. I can’t believe I’m still doing this after fifty years.

I played with the phone cord in my hand as I sat in a hotel room in Chiang Mai on a lumpy red bedspread. The steamy heat made my shirt stick to my back. What would it have taken to tell my father that I hated that dog? I definitely didn’t want to leave Thailand early to go home to bury him.

In the summer of 1990, Ghost Dad was butchered. The critics all agreed: this comedy, directed by Sidney Poitier, starring Bill Cosby, was dead in the water. The film told the story of Elliot Hopper, a workaholic widower with three children, who were forced to raise themselves in his absence. And this happened all before he became a ghost.

Margaret and I are much too sober for this place and I’m not in the mood for what’s on the menu—stale beer and dim neon lights. Eileen, a friend who used to work with me at a now-defunct magazine, wants to stay out at the Legion-style bar across the street from her studio apartment. It’s not a particularity shady late-night bar it’s just not where Margaret or I want to be.

Five years after my dad kicked me out, I was sitting in a swivel chair around a large oval table with ten other students in an Abnormal Child Development class. At twenty-one, I’d found my way into being a graduate student at Bank Street College of Education. Our teacher looked somber as she introduced the evening’s topic. “Tonight, we’ll be talking together about Adverse Childhood Experiences.