What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence (What We Don't Talk About Book 1)

by Michele Filgate

For even a brief instant of time, every single human being has a mother. That mother-and-child connection is a complicated one. Yet we live in a society where we have holidays that assume a happy relationship. Every year when Mother’s Day rolls around, I brace myself for the onslaught of Facebook posts paying tribute to the strong, loving women who shaped their offspring. I’m always happy to see mothers celebrated, but there’s a part of me that finds it painful too.

Mothers are idealized as protectors: a person who is caring and giving and who builds a person up rather than knocking them down. But very few of us can say that our mothers check all of these boxes. In many ways, a mother is set up to fail. “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,” Lynn Steger Strong writes in this book.

The more we face what we can’t or won’t or don’t know, the more we understand one another.

Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them. To know what it was like to have one place where we belonged. Where we fit.

“I love you past the sun and the moon and the stars,” she’d always say to me when I was little. But I just want her to love me here. Now. On Earth.

Storytelling is a fight against forgetting, against loss and even mortality. Every time a story is told about someone who’s dead, it’s a resurrection. Every time a story is told about the past, we’re doubly alive.

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.

I think of her distantly, like someone I knew from an intro-to-biology class my first semester in college, instead of the woman who raised me. I don’t know what she makes of me, now. Everything I am is proof that she was wrong about me, and yet the woman I’ve known for my entire life does not apologize, does not admit to fault. I believe that she loves me, in the same way that I believe that it’s best that we are not a part of each other’s lives. Because my identity has been shaped by what she is not; she is, for me, an example of how not to conduct a life.