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

While I write, my stepfather sits at his desk that’s right outside my bedroom. He’s working on his laptop, but every time his chair squeaks or he makes any kind of movement, fear rises up from my stomach to the back of my throat. I keep my door closed, but that’s useless, since I’m not allowed to lock it.

“You guys are talking like it wasn’t a big deal. This is absolutely insane stuff.” We looked at her, startled; we hadn’t thought of it as particularly dysfunctional. So much had happened that we normalized what others would not and forgot what most other people would not forget. In this essay I’ve only talked about a few of the memories that are crystal clear. There is a fog of others. It has been one of the greatest blessings of my life that my sister is able to mirror my experience.

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.

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.

The first thing that my father said to me when my mother died was that she had loved me. And at the time, I thought, what a ridiculous thing to say. Not because her love was evident to me—it was not and is not, really, an evident thing—but because he thought it meant so much to me and I felt at the time that it didn’t. I scoffed and made a joke and he said it again: She loved you. You know that, right? She loved you. It wasn’t the sort of thing that we said in my family. My family was a series of hushed rages behind shut doors. 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.

It’s also true, however, that I’ve been the one to leave almost every relationship I’ve ever been in—and often, not always, because I felt a certain kind of claustrophobia, which isn’t to pathologize my past so much as to suggest that perhaps I share my mom’s attachment to distances and boundaries more than I’ve recognized, that her hunger for independence isn’t so alien to me.