What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence (What We Don't Talk About)

by Michele Filgate

laughed. If love is blind, love is also, apparently, deaf. My father is the same person he always was—at least for the fifty-five years I’ve known him. And so is my mother.

And as Elie Wiesel said, the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference—and one thing you could never call my father was indifferent. He was there. Front and center, in your face, all the time.

The attachment styles that define our adult relationships are determined in that first relationship, aren’t they?

Listen to me, she said, her voice strong and unwavering as a hand under my chin. You could never lose me. I will love you every day of your life. There is nothing you could do to make me stop loving you. I didn’t answer. Do you hear me?

Hurting those we love is survivable. It is inevitable. I wish that I could have done less of it. But no matter how much of it I did, I would never have lost her.

Where does the dancing mother go when she’s not here? Where has she been all our lives?

I thought for a few hours after I cried in the bathroom that I would call her and I would tell her I loved her. But I did not trust calling her. I was afraid that if I called her, she would talk and it would be too hard for me to love her after that.

There is a gaping hole perhaps for all of us, where our mother does not match up with “mother” as we believe it’s meant to mean and all it’s meant to give us. What I cannot tell her is all that I would tell her if I could find a way to not still be sad and angry about that.

The older I got, the more complicated our relationship became.

And that the thing that keeps me from tackling parenthood with eagerness is not, really, money or ambition or hypochondria or selfishness. Rather, it’s the fear that I’ve learned less from my childhood than I should have, that I am more like her than I want to be.

They seem to see this as an indication that I was a good child, an obedient child. They don’t see this as unusual behavior, masking deeper psychological implications.

Any assertion of individual identity was an indication of abandonment, a sign that we did not love her.

He was always so concerned about other people, how we looked to them, what we stole from them. He never seemed to care about what was taken from us.

Twenty-eight years later, I still have the scar of that cut. It reminds me of how it feels to need comfort and instead find rage.

This is how I survived my childhood: I disappeared. As a child I slipped into books, and everything around me, including my own body, faded away. It was a very conscious act. I am very lucky that early and unknowingly, I found books instead of any other drug. I’ve never fully returned from that early dissociation.

they weren’t willing to save their own lives, I wasn’t going to drown with them.

We get so used to the stories we tell about ourselves. This is why we sometimes need to find ourselves in the stories of others.