Jenny goes on to recall her strained relationship with her own mother, whom she says told her that she “didn’t know how to be a mom anymore” when she was just 12. Noting that she’d fly between Phoenix and San Diego as “an unaccompanied minor” every month or two to visit her, Jenny says, “I never understood how she could tolerate it. How she could sleep through the night knowing I was in another state, in another house, with another woman who wasn’t her. I don’t think I’ve ever fully healed that wound. And I don’t know that I ever will.”

“When I became a mom, I wasn’t prepared for how thoroughly a love like this would break me. How it would turn me inside out and make knots of my viscera,” she says, describing motherhood as “vulnerability in a form so all-encompassing that it borders on masochism.”