“” – Laura Bailey

Laura always had notes for me. Not love notes. Correction notes.

She would often get mad at me and want to “fix” the way I interacted with people, especially her family or old school friends. It didn’t come up in the moment. It came later, at home, in the car, or the next day.

The notes were always contradictory. One time I was too quiet. The next time I talked too much. Another time I didn’t look like I was having fun. And if I did look like I was having fun, apparently it wasn’t convincing enough.

I’ll admit I have a bit of resting bitch face, but Laura treated anything short of an over-the-top performance of overwhelming delight as a personal attack. If I wasn’t constantly grinning like a lunatic, I was sabotaging her show.

In most families, people have old dynamics they fall back into around their parents. It’s normal, even if it’s awkward. Gracious people are aware of it. They try to soften the edges when a partner is involved.

Not Laura. Not her parents. Their dynamic was frozen in some weird, immature, abusive loop. The rule of the game was simple: applaud them like children who had just pulled off a fartypants. No matter what they said. It could be rude, condescending, and deliberately provocative, but you weren’t allowed to change the subject or defuse it. You had to “yes, and” them like you were in an improv class where the only audience was your future jailer.

One incident stands out for how stupid it was. We were at her mother’s house with her brother. Something about the moon landing conspiracy came up on TV. Her brother made a crack. I followed with a harmless little joke of my own, and the conversation moved on.

I didn’t think about it again until the next day on the underground. Laura turned to me with a serious face. She said I had made her mother feel stupid, and I needed to apologize.

I had no idea what she was talking about until she explained: I had embarrassed her mother by making a joke about the moon landing conspiracy. Forget that Luke made the first joke. Forget that I had no idea her mother actually believed one of the dumbest conspiracy theories on the planet.

I laughed and asked if she was serious. She was. In fact, she doubled down. She told me her mother wasn’t stupid because she herself wasn’t sure the moon landings had really happened. She claimed there was no proof the moon landings even happened. Who knows if she really believed it, or if her convictions just bent toward whichever path of least resistance lay in front of her.

This should have been an early warning sign that for all Laura’s talk about how abusive her mother had been her entire life, when push came to shove, she was going to fold under Debra’s wings and defend even the most imaginary of grievances.

Let me be clear: if you believe the moon landings were faked, you are one of the dumbest motherfuckers on this planet. There are a lot of conspiracy theories that are idiotic, but this one takes the gold medal for how little curiosity and intelligence you need to buy into it.

That moon landing fiasco was the dumbest of the “corrections,” but it wasn’t an outlier. After almost every interaction with her family or school friends, Laura would find a way to scold me. Less often with my family or our newer friends, but still enough that it became routine.

Abuse doesn’t always look like shouting. Sometimes it’s just correction notes, delivered until the insane became etiquette and you find yourself apologizing to the Flat Earth Society at dinner.