Amanda Lindamood
4 min readMay 7, 2019

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Julia, one of four adult children in the Braverman family, is in the kitchen making breakfast for her two children.

Her children are rattling off questions and she is responding.

Then her ears start to ring.

The toast is burning. The eggs start to burn. The smoke detector goes off loudly.

The two children continue to talk to her, calling her attention to all of these signals of emergency.

“Mom! I’m talking to you? Why aren’t you answering?”

You see Julia scraping burnt shavings off a piece of toast in the sink, decompensating amidst the brewing chaos.

Her husband enters and yells at the kids to leave the room so he can attend to his wife, who now is crying, struggling to breathe, and collapsing to the floor in a panic attack.

She pushes him away, overwhelmed by his touch as he encourages her to breathe out.

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Amanda Lindamood

Writer. Thinker. Facilitator. Advocate. Invested in accountability for power based violence, creative initiatives, and meaningful, nuanced dialoguing.