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

He loomed so large in my house that I wanted to disappear until, finally, I did.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that this essay wasn’t really about my stepfather. The reality was far more complicated and difficult to face. The core truths behind my essay took years to confront and articulate. What I wanted (and needed) to write about was my fractured relationship with my mother.

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

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.

My mother is hard to know. Or rather, I know her and don’t know her at the same time.

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.

But she had admitted it’s “not worth” fighting him to have access to her daughters—or anyone else; that, point blank, she chooses placating him over talking to us.

As the firstborn and the sister arguably most affected, back then, by his narcissism and authoritarianism, I don’t cut him much slack.

The closer the mother and the daughter are, they say, the more violent the daughter’s work to free herself.

I was frightened, yes, but I followed him. Perhaps that was the scariest part.

did feel part father, part husband. Maybe every daughter does. Or just the ones whose fathers have gone.

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

too visible in the wrong way, which is the same as not being seen.

My memories of him are still another color from the rest, as if they were all lived in another dimension.

I knew it would grieve her. Another disaster. I was her other hand; she needed me. I couldn’t be broken too. And so I had hidden myself inside a lesser disaster to survive this one. Hidden myself altogether.

The overture starts, horns so effusive and cheery I know they’re lying. But my parents pretend this is what happiness sounds like.

Yes, I still lived under his roof, but I was no longer a child, muted by my age and dependency.

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.

But I did not trust calling her. I was afraid that if I called her, she would talk and it would be too hard for me to love her after that.

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.

not least because I thought there might be other ways to love and to be loved.

There was no trust, no affection, no listening, just ignorant micromanagement.

Because my identity has been shaped by what she is not; she is, for me, an example of how not to conduct a life. I believe that her pride in my accomplishments—and her love for me—is actively battling her resentment, but I don’t want to oversee that civil war, and I don’t have to.

This is what my mother and I don’t talk about: That it is not my fault she is so profoundly unhappy with her life.

The problem was that she saw no difference between her body and my body.

Constantly, I wavered between these two understandings of myself, never sure where to land, always looking for evidence as to what I was.

They seem to see this as an indication that I was a good child, an obedient child. They don’t see this as unusual behavior, masking deeper psychological implications.

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

The problem was that we never knew which mother we would have, which parents we would have: the predictable parents who made us study and who we knew loved us, or the ones who violently raged at each other and caught us up in their maelstrom. We were experts in reading their moods, always on guard for the moment when the darkness returned.

It reminds me of how it feels to need comfort and instead find rage. It reminds me that in moments of pain I will never turn to her for comfort because she, hurt child as she is, will never be able to give it to me.

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.

Because the borderline mother is unable to remember intensely emotional events, she is unable to learn from experience [my italics]. She may repeat destructive behaviors without remembering previous consequences.”4

It has been one of the greatest blessings of my life that my sister is able to mirror my experience.

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.

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.

What is love if you get it secondhand? Is it a fact or merely a detail?

I think, ultimately, other people aren’t real to us until they’re suffering or gone.

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

It was a way of holding on to my mother, so he could let go of her in life.

“I wasn’t angry. Just enormously sad.”

I spent much of my young adulthood believing: 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.