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

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.

Silence is what fills the gap between my mother and me. All of the things we haven’t said to each other, because it’s too painful to articulate. What I want to say: I need you to believe me. I need you to listen. I need you. What I say: nothing. Nothing until I say everything. But articulating what happened isn’t enough. She’s still married to him. The gap widens.

“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.

The storyteller is a survivor, after all. I lived to tell the tale is not an idle saying. My mother was giving voice to the past, to those who couldn’t tell their own stories. 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.

The word, I guess, is “estranged,” and there is indeed something strange about it: 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 would speak to him, he would relay the message, and in the background I would make out her voice telling him what to say, which he would relay back to me. Sometimes I would ask him to put her on the phone and let her tell me whatever came to mind, because I missed her voice and wanted to hear her say the things she had always said to me, slurring her words a bit, ungrammatical, words that weren’t necessarily words even, just sounds that reached far back to my childhood, when I didn’t know words.

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.

I was sure that if I just found the right tool for her—meditation, a book, a counselor that she liked—she would be happy. I would save her. It was all up to me. I had escaped the prison walls of my childhood but I carried that prison inside me well into adulthood.

That was my breaking point. If they weren’t willing to save their own lives, I wasn’t going to drown with them.

Any more than a few hours in their company and I am assailed by the insurmountable mountain of what we cannot talk about. In their company I find myself turning mute, surly, rude. I become a different person than I know myself to be, a different person than my close ones know me to be. The burden of the unsaid turns my heart into a balled fist.

I know my parents love and miss me. I, too, deeply mourn all that we lost. But I have reached the bottom of my own particular well. There is compassion here but not much hope for connection beyond that. When I leave my childhood house, my parents stand outside, waving. She on the front steps, he on the edge of the lawn. They wave and wave as I drive away. They will not go into the house until they lose sight of me. They keep waving until they are very small, like tiny children, in my rearview mirror and then they are gone. Then slowly I can remember that I have made a different path for myself. I have found the ones who know my heart and keep it safe. I have created myself as someone who, on most days, I like, respect, and love. I have made my way into myself and learned that love, too, is contagious. I have learned that healing is possible. That we can make lives that we couldn’t even have imagined when we were little and that we can carry the little ones who we were into these new and luminous lives.

As hard as we try to fight the structures we find ourselves inside of, we are all still shaped by them.

My ego and my mother’s ego are built in similar ways. Once again, I search for the edges between us, try to remind myself they are there. But there is a kind of amniotic pleasure in having trouble locating these edges, in feeling this symmetry instead, this union. How had Peter put it? So much together, but not merging. Sometimes it feels good to merge, to say—irrationally, feverishly, stubbornly—I am my mother, and she is me. Jason and the colonel must have assumed we were a family: two tall ex-hippies in their early seventies and their tall daughter. And today, in a strange way, we are: the manifestation of an alternate reality, the road not traveled, in which Peter and my mom had a child together, and took her with them—three decades later—to keep protesting the world.

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.