When people ask me if I had a happy childhood, I never quite know how to respond. It wasn’t unhappy — not in any dramatic sense — but it was complicated.
My parents were both fiercely independent people, and they raised my sister and me to be the same. At the time, I interpreted that as emotional distance. There weren’t many heart-to-heart conversations, and praise was rare. Instead, approval came in the form of higher expectations.
Only later did I realise that their restraint wasn’t indifferen