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

The silence in the church isn’t always peaceful. It just makes it more jarring when the tiniest noise, a muffled cough or a creaky knee, echoes throughout the sanctuary. You can’t be wholly yourself there. You have to hollow yourself out, like a husk.

the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference—and

don’t know if we had a conversation about trust that night. We had had them so many times before, my mother trying to broker an understanding, to cast a single line across the distance between us. If trust was broken, my mother explained, it had to be rebuilt. But the sanctity of our trust held no currency with me, so broken trust came to mean the loss of certain freedoms. It didn’t work. She didn’t want to revoke my freedoms; she wanted me to come home to her. Probably I knew this. If she didn’t like the distance my lies created, then she would like even less my silence and sulks, my slammed bedroom door. Of course I won. We each had something the other wanted, but I alone had conviction.

I couldn’t tell the difference between my fear and desire—both thrilled my body, itself already a stranger.

Besides, there was so much more to Hades than heroin.

and sprinkled in the fields. The sacrifice becomes the harvest. All of my violences might be seen this way: a descent, a rise, a sowing. If we sow them, every sacrifice can become a harvest.

There is a difference between the fear of upsetting someone who loves you and the danger of losing them.

She has one hand on the doorknob, and I don’t know how to swim to her or if I even want to. “It’s okay,” I say.

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.

In my family, love was the slow accumulation of moments in which I was not subjected to great harm.

I think, ultimately, other people aren’t real to us until they’re suffering or gone.

It’s strange, really, that to grasp that which has hurt you, you must trust it not to hurt you when you let it inhabit you.

In the aftermath of every breakup, it had been simultaneously comforting and deflating to hear her say it wasn’t the end of the world. Now I realized that wisdom hadn’t been entirely intuitive; it had also been a kind of muscle memory—something she might have wanted to tell that version of herself, from the past, the one who thought she’d ruined everything.

When we talk about how there are always two sides to every story, we often imagine conflicting accounts of what happened. But more often, I think, the disagreement is about what belongs in the story at all.

Looking back, she can see she was trying to break something that she sensed was already ruptured.

Both Peter and my mom agree that she wasn’t ready to get married. “Your mother had to be convinced,” Peter tells me. She says, “I ran out of reasons to say no.”

My mom says she was deeply in love with Peter but not ready to be married to anyone. She tells me, “I wish I could have understood that better then.”

Peter describes the end of their marriage as the breakdown of a certain youthful faith. “I grew up thinking I could do anything I wanted,” he says, “and here was something I really wanted and I couldn’t make it work.”

three primal male archetypes: the brash, idealistic young dreamer; the restless, intoxicating, difficult soul mate; and the stable partner to settle down with after all the drama was done.

it was an expression of my frustration that he wasn’t using his gifts to live the kind of life that I wanted to lead.”

I have projected ambitions onto my own partners for years. It hasn’t been ego extension so much as a desire to dwell in states of awe—to feel inspired and somehow bettered—but it can also feel like callousness, or distance.

“My voice is not loud, but there is so much violence in it that Sheila is stunned for a moment. I pause for several heartbeats, savoring the drama of the situation, savoring the feeling of power.”

It’s about knowing who someone was and how they changed—and carrying all those past versions of them inside.

It allowed me to see that both she and I have always been more complicated than the binaries I’ve constructed for us to inhabit, in which we are either identical or opposite. 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.