My mother is a loud woman. She loves to tell jokes and wears the kind of statement jewelry you can spot from a block away. But during the 25 tumultuous years she was married to my father, she often kept her mouth shut — literally. “I didn’t speak to him for an entire year when you were kids,” she told me once, shaking her head. “One day, he finally asked me, ‘Is there a problem?’”

Clearly, there were lots of problems. Growing up, I watched as my mother detached more and more from my father, emotionally and physically. She stopped watching movies with him. She slept in the guest room. She glared at the back of his head from her place at the stove. “Did I make the right decision? In retrospect, no,” she says now. “I didn’t have options like women do today. At the time, it felt like that

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