On an early evening during our first pandemic winter, I closed my laptop and commuted from my home office upstairs to our kitchen below. Another day of quarantine, another at-home meal to prepare for my family. That afternoon I had kneaded pizza dough and left it to rise inside the corner cabinet, warmed by the heating duct that runs beneath it. Now, the plaid kitchen towel draped over the bowl puffed above the rim, like the fabric below the empire waist of a maternity dress.

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.

“El Wacko is snorting coke in the bathroom,” Daniel shouted. He stormed into his parents’ room. I studied my godbrother, round eyes and mouth open, from my seat on the nightstand. My back pressed against rows and rows of vitamins, all promising weight loss, wishing to be anywhere but here.

In early spring of 2018, I found myself on a phone call with an estranged cousin, Beate. I had just moved back to Germany to research and relive my childhood in preparation for work on a memoir. When my cousin learned I had moved back, she got in touch.

Summer bore down hard, distorting the asphalt along with my mood. I damned the weather as it must’ve been close to one hundred degrees. My dogs, trying to cool themselves, unfurled their pink tongues and panted. “Almost home,” I said to them. I kneeled down under the shade of a tall flowering tree to stroke their fur, and noticed a familiar looking leaf on the sidewalk.

When the breeze blew cold, the sun shined bright, and the room filled with tears of happiness, you were holding a little girl in your arms. Your arms that were warm enough to cuddle her that rainy and chilling July. Your fingers that lingered over her head and a kiss you planted on her forehead. She was lucky enough to come into this world and call you her “Papa.” I am proud to be that grown up little girl of yours.

There are great concrete buttresses at my back holding up a lantern of light in the church behind me. I’m sitting on concrete steps, staring at one resilient weed working its way through a crack. Little survivor. I come here for the huge sky: tall river-meets-sea light, gulls wheeling and screaming, silvering the air, and the smell of all those far-off places I’ve never been to, swept briskly up here by the winds off the huge river. Close your eyes, you could be anywhere. It’s magic.

Is grief supposed to feel so much like shame? Mine does. Telling my story seems dangerous. It is something I hold close to my chest; I hesitate to reveal even the smallest details unless I have to. To speak of loss and pain out loud makes me vulnerable. It shakes a carefully crafted persona. It could mean people will think less of me, people will not like me. It could mean I get fired from my job, because I am someone who can’t cope. It could mean I will be left, once again, utterly, unbearably alone. That is too high a price to pay.