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

by Michele Filgate

Because it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels . . . —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Mothers are idealized as protectors: a person who is caring and giving and who builds a person up rather than knocking them down.

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.

But I just want her to love me here. Now. On Earth.

“But honestly, I don’t remember all these little things! Not until they’re brought up again. And I do think it’s a healthy denial that allows my marriage to continue.”

Was he abusive, or just inflexible and empathy-challenged? Really, does it matter?

the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference—and

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

You could never lose me. I will love you every day of your life. There is nothing you could do to make me stop loving you.

I was, am, a receptive ear, to many, and I learned it here.

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.

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.

Can we please get better at loving each other in America?

Any assertion of individual identity was an indication of abandonment, a sign that we did not love her.

The website borderlinepersonalitytreatment.com lists the following as baseline symptoms of borderline personality disorder (a condition contracted in childhood by abandonment, abuse, or death): neglect, overcontrol, rage, criticism, blame, enmeshment, parental alienation.

Borderlines often have unbearable self-loathing and despair.

“I would be so cruel. I would make people I loved hurt. I would spew venom at them and see how they were hurt by my words and it would hurt me but I couldn’t stop. It was as if I wanted to keep hurting myself through them.”

Wow. Being diagnosed with BPD and reaDing this has me thinking on so many things i have done and said

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.