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

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.

it felt like giving to them in a way that was both familiar and substantial; it felt like what they needed, how I wanted to be a mother; it also felt like my mom.

I think my mom wanted to live a selfish existence. I do not think she imagined herself struggling to find her identity in her forties, fifties, sixties. And I don’t blame her. I want to be selfish, too.

Narrative demands friction,

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.

because it reminds me so fully of the ways I have projected ambitions onto my own partners for years. It hasn’t been ego extension so much as a desire to dwell in states of awe—to feel inspired and somehow bettered—but it can also feel like callousness, or distance.

Perhaps I project false confidence onto my younger mother because it’s uncomfortable for me to imagine her in terms of uncertainty. For me, she has always been the source of inviolable love, the definition of devotion, the absence of contingency.

I’d expected a regular protest—where I could chant in relative ignorance, self-satisfied and anonymous—but this is something else: a kind of pop quiz. What do I actually know about Standing Rock? Not enough to talk to a colonel for an hour.

I suspected that my only choices were to identify with my mom completely or else to somehow fail her.