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

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.

“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.

(I would think of that song from Oliver!: “As long as he needs me / I know where I must be.”)

And as Elie Wiesel said, the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference—and one thing you could never call my father was indifferent.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by

“I didn’t feel misunderstood. Just hurt.

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.

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