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

My mother and I don’t speak that often. Making a recipe is a contract with myself that I can execute easily. Talking to my mother isn’t as simple,

Three years later, I sent her the book I’d written. You can’t call me until you’ve finished reading it, I said. In it were all the things I’d never told her about the heroin and the parts of that job that hadn’t felt like feminist activism or even acting. Take as much time as you need, I said, hoping that she would take as much time as she needed to not need to talk to me about how it felt to read those things. She agreed. The phone rang the next morning at 7 a.m. Mom? You were supposed to wait until you finished reading the book to call me. I did. You did? I couldn’t stop. I kept putting it down and turning out the light and then turning it back on and picking it back up again. Why? I had to know that you were going to be all right. It was the hardest thing she’d ever had to read, she said. It was a masterpiece, she said.

The morning that I finally decided to leave that lover, I called my mother. This time, I did not wait three years to write a book about it and then send it to her. I am leaving her, I said. It’s been so much worse than I told you. How worse? she asked me, and I told her. Why didn’t you tell me? she asked. I don’t know, I said. I was weeping. What if I had told you and then didn’t leave her? She was quiet for a moment. Did you think that I would hold that against you? I wept harder and covered my eyes with my hand. Listen to me, she said, her voice strong and unwavering as a hand under my chin. 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 didn’t answer. Do you hear me?

There is a difference between the fear of upsetting someone who loves you and the danger of losing them. For a long time, I couldn’t separate them. It has taken me some work to discern the difference between the pain of hurting those I love and my fear of what I might lose. Hurting those we love is survivable. It is inevitable. I wish that I could have done less of it. But no matter how much of it I did, I would never have lost her.

Like my ancestors, I believe that stories can save us. Our stories are our greatest currency. What one person is willing to share with another is a test of intimacy, a gift that’s given.

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.

I trade in stories maybe, but I think most of us do this. We pick the stories; we curate them; we pass them on to prove things either about us or about the people who they hold inside.

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.

Now that I have thought about all of it, and shared it with you, how will we allow all of it, all the whiles, any of the whiles, to make us better at loving us backward and forward? That is the only question that matters to me right now. Can you tell me what questions matter to you? Can we spend the rest of our lives talking about those questions?

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 us.

What ensued in the next five years was a journey toward healing that continues into the present. It involved ripping up the neural networks that had been laid down in my brain in childhood and remained there for over thirty years and replacing them, one by one, with something new. As with any ripping, it was excruciating.

The burden of the unsaid turns my heart into a balled fist.

They don’t realize they are living the good old days, the ones they will someday look back on, the ones a daughter might look back on, too—as if she is peering over the shoulders of their ghosts, hungry for the lives they once lived.

A couple came to dinner one night, and after the meal the wife said, “If it’s okay, my husband is going to have dessert”—then he started breastfeeding right there at the table. It sounds like the punch line to a joke: How do you make two aspiring hippies feel like prudes?