What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence (What We Don't Talk About)

by Michele Filgate

Just as every human being has a mother, we all share the instinct to avoid pain at all costs. We try to bury it deep inside of us until we can no longer feel it, until we forget that it exists. This is how we survive.

The more we face what we can’t or won’t or don’t know, the more we understand one another.

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 other thing that saved me was being in a long-term romantic relationship. I tantrummed for years and when I was done, Whit was still there. With him I had all the emotions I had not been allowed to have as a child, because for the first time, I knew I was safe. Some deep part of me recognized that I could trust him, even though I didn’t consciously believe this until years later.

He came into our relationship with understanding and compassion already in his bloodline, and I could not have asked for a better partner in the lifework of love.

I think that I understand my mother so much better now. I know that even as she hurts people she is hurting exponentially more. I’ve

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.

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 think, ultimately, other people aren’t real to us until they’re suffering or gone. That’s when the imagination begins to work, trying to sort things out, trying to get them right, to understand them.

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.