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

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.

She ran around, tending to everyone’s needs, until my father came home, and then she tended to his.

And I do think it’s a healthy denial that allows my marriage to continue.” I nodded. I have noticed that in many, if not all, longtime marriages, there’s both pragmatism and some (healthy?) denial.

Was he abusive, or just inflexible and empathy-challenged? Really, does it matter?

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

On any given day I felt like a freak, too visible in the wrong way, which is the same as not being seen.

Food is our first experience of care, a child psychiatrist tells me, when I go.

“You can only turn yourself out so far, to be what another person wants you to be.”

The stories I told myself about these three marriages eventually distilled into 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.