The real evidence you grew up in a loving home is not a stack of happy memories but a set of quiet adult capacities: you can accept comfort, sit with conflict, and tell the story of your childhood with warmth and honesty at once

When people go looking for proof that they were loved as children, they usually reach for memories. A particular birthday, a parent in the crowd at a school play, the smell of a kitchen on a Sunday. Those memories are lovely to have, but they are shaky eviden…