“We think back through our mothers,” said Woolf, “if we are women.” Men, perhaps, do not. Not as much. I know I didn’t.

It wasn’t until the early months of 2014 that I vividly saw my mother, Liz Brooker, as a person with a life entirely independent from mine and crucially, far longer and richer than mine, with experiences and insights I could only wonder at. It happened soon after her mother, Margaret Stray, died.

It was a Quaker service. Family members took turns to stand up and read, to remember, to say whatever they liked. My mum went first, and she related, in a voice that was sad and steady and resigned, her memories of her own 1940s childhood; from the daytimes, when her dad went to work and her brother was at school, and my mum and my grandma were alone. As she spoke, another world opened that I hadn’t known about, and had never thought to ask about. It was a world where, as she said, it was just the two of them. They went for walks in the morning and my grandma told my mom the names of the plants and flowers they passed, and then they went home and in the afternoon they played games together, like shop. And the whole world, for that time, was just the two of them.

It was a simple speech but one of the most powerful I’ve ever heard. I think the way I saw my mother subtly shifted at that moment, and never quite changed back. I feel slightly ashamed that it took so long.

Toward the end of this year I visited my parents. After a few glasses of wine, I asked my mom for the first time what her experiences of feminism were. I remembered, from when I was a teenager, that she—a primary school teacher at the time—had a stenciled print on the wall promoting a women’s march, with the instruction “wear suffragette colors:” the first time I’d ever seen that word.