One sentence from my mother can still reduce me to a smaller version of myself

Dear Delyara, It doesn’t even have to be cruel. That is the part no one sees clearly enough from the outside. She can say it as concern, as a joke, as “just being honest,” and still I can feel my whole body move toward apology. As if adulthood has not actually overwritten childhood in the places that matter most. As if one tone still has direct access to the little frightened version of me who learned early that love and criticism often came holding hands. After calls like that, I don’t only feel hurt. I feel ashamed of how fast I became reachable. That shame lasts longer than the conversation does. And then I’m angry — with her, with myself, with all the years between us that have still not turned me into someone fully immune to her tone. I am old enough to understand it. Apparently not old enough to stop feeling it first in my body.