Last year Wood rallied some friends to go to the rage room after the Kavanaugh hearings. “We were like, ‘Okay, we're going,’" she recalls with a laugh. Wood does this a lot—laugh, I mean, in a wonderful and unfettered way totally at odds with the subject matter at hand. It bubbles up throughout our conversation, no matter if we're talking about the effects of PTSD or bi chairs. Frankly, it's a familiar 2019 mood. When everything is going to shit, what else can you do but laugh and rage? "There was no other way to deal with it in that moment," she says. (I wonder, in this moment, why we chose to meet at Milk Studios when we could’ve bashed some fax machines up while talking, instead. Maybe next time.)

Still, even with all the tools at her disposal and her years of practice at it, taking time to care for herself sometimes isn’t so simple, especially when she has others relying on her to show up no matter what. As the mother of a six-year-old son, Wood understands this well. She says that mixing motherhood with tending to her own mental health comes with a bit of a learning curve. "It's a really delicate balance of self-care and needing to be there all the time for this other life, and not having to feel guilty about taking the time to take care of yourself,” she says. “Because I know that if I don't do that, I'm not going to be the best mom for my kid."

There is a silver lining, though: She’s using what she’s learned from her own experiences to give her son the necessary tools of self-preservation. Some of the advice she has passed on to him is about how to cope if he’s having a terrible day, feeling overwhelmed, spinning out, or just angry and can’t feel better. "There are three things that I want you to do first," she tells him in those instances: "Get a good night's sleep, drink a bunch of water, and listen to music."

Wood is modeling behavior for her son in other ways too. Given that so many of the complicated conversations our culture is currently entrenched in revolve around violence and trauma at the hands of men, it’s an interesting time to be raising a young boy, to say the least.

“I can only hope that I am raising a good man,” she says. Part of that, she knows, will be about navigating this culture of sexual assault and how so many consequences of toxic masculinity involve learned behavior. “It’s just as much a conversation about boys. I feel like we're failing them by not addressing the fact that there is this culture of violence. I hope one day men are outraged of the shitty stereotypes that we're pushing in their name, because I get outraged for my son.”

Wood took her son into consideration when deciding whether to come forward with her domestic violence story. She knew that one day he might read her testimonies, or discover other artifacts of her past. So she sat him down and explained to him what had happened to her in a way that a child could understand. And he was sad about it, she says, but he was also okay. More than anything, he was just happy that his mom was okay.

“I think it inspired him to want to be a better person,” she says. She recalls times when her son has noticed the culture around him, picking up on things like subtle sexism and pushing back against stereotypes. “Kids are actually more understanding than adults most of the time,” Wood says. “They can actually handle a lot if you're just really honest with them and give them a chance. They have such open hearts and are so willing to learn and have these conversations.”