I’m going to try to write about my mother. Fair warning: I may suck at this.

One of the benefits of being a mother myself is I get to update all of my perceptions about my own childhood with current medical understanding. Which is to say: my mother was the neurotypical in a house full of weirdos.

She was young when she married – not yet 21, not yet graduated from college. She had pictures in her head of what married life would be like. She told me once she’d always wanted the house to sme...