“My siblings and my mother wouldn’t communicate for most of the year, so by Christmas dinner my brother and sister would come stuffed with hurt and anger, starving for attention. Eventually, inevitably, they would all explode in a torrent of verbal abuse. I would sit there in the center of the chaos, crying and wishing: wishing they would stop screaming, wishing my mother could stop them from screaming and cursing. Wishing I could be somewhere safe and merry – somewhere that felt like Christmas.”
