“‘This is Diana—our family dropout,’ my mother said for the fifteenth Thanksgiving in a row, but when my sister’s new husband reached across the table to shake my hand, his grip locked, his face went still, and the room forgot how to laugh before he said the two words nobody there was prepared to hear”

her first year at a prestigious Richmond firm when she became pregnant with me. She left the practice when I was born. She always said it was a choice.

By the time I was old enough to understand that sentence, I could hear what the choice had cost her, even when she couldn’t say it directly. There was a way she said the word career when she spoke about continue reading …