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

Because it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels . . . —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“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.

What were her dreams—or did she not have any, beyond the comfortable, practical, admirable life she was living?

But I want to be the daughter of this mother, the one who lives in a pink building, the one who dances.

I still desperately want to live there, because even though I am now fifty-eight, without a mother I am forever eight.

“I imagine all the things that he could have done if his life had allowed it,” she said.

“You need to learn to make better choices,” she told me, though what choices they were, she never specified. Besides, all I could hear was, I wish I’d made better choices. And I couldn’t help her with that.

It reminds me that in moments of pain I will never turn to her for comfort because she, hurt child as she is, will never be able to give it to me.

We didn’t say I love you or good night or good morning. The very act of speaking felt strained and hard. To say anything at all felt like putting the most vulnerable part of yourself on the table.

When she arrived in the hospital after my daughter was born, I sat there on the starched sheets holding my baby, and she held me, and I cried uncontrollably—because I could finally understand how much she loved me, and I could hardly stand the grace of it.

Trying to write about my mother is like staring at the sun. It feels like language could only tarnish this thing she has given me, my whole life—this love.

I spent much of my young adulthood believing: that it is better to be the one desired more, rather than the one doing more desiring. As if love were a contest; as if desire were fixed, or absolute; as if either position could insulate you from being harmed or causing harm; as if being in control could insulate you from anything.

Once again, I search for the edges between us, try to remind myself they are there.

Sometimes it feels good to merge, to say—irrationally, feverishly, stubbornly—I am my mother, and she is me.

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.