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

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, nor was writing my essay in this book.

It felt like I had set fire to my own life. To live with the pain of my strained relationship with my mother is one thing. To immortalize it in words is a whole other level.

There’s something deeply lonely about confessing your truth.

For others, it’s the realization that their mother, although alive, doesn’t know how to mother them.

There’s a relief in breaking the silence. This is also how we grow. Acknowledging what we couldn’t say for so long, for whatever reason, is one way to heal our relationships with others and, perhaps most important, with ourselves.

Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to give this book to my mother. To present it to her as a precious gift over a meal that I’ve cooked for her. To say: Here is everything that keeps us from really talking. Here is my heart. Here are my words. I wrote this for you.

The dread I felt did not rise from my thoughts but from my gut, from some corporeal logic that had kept meticulous track of every mistake before this one. That believed there was a finite number of times one could break someone’s heart before it hardened to you.

It is so painful to be loved sometimes. Intolerable, even.

I couldn’t tell the difference between my fear and desire—both thrilled my body, itself already a stranger.

I pulled the front door shut behind me and something tore inside, like a cloth that still hasn’t mended. Still, the quickening as I lit a cigarette in the dark and turned off of our road toward the highway. I imagine that this is the way a man feels leaving his family for his mistress. I did feel part father, part husband. Maybe every daughter does. Or just the ones whose fathers have gone.

“I imagine all the things that he could have done if his life had allowed it,” she said.

I watched her face change shape as she remembered we were only on the same team for as long as it took to get what we wanted.

I went into a bathroom stall and sat until I stopped. I hadn’t spoken to my mother recently. We don’t speak often. I couldn’t locate the specific feeling I’d had the last time we talked.

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.

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.

Twenty-eight years later, I still have the scar of that cut. 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.

This is how I survived my childhood: I disappeared. As a child I slipped into books, and everything around me, including my own body, faded away.

I’ve never fully returned from that early dissociation. My deepest life has been spent inside books, both in the consumption and later in the creation of them,

In the years after, I consistently chose partners who were less emotionally healthy than me. I knew the savior role intimately.

I had escaped the prison walls of my childhood but I carried that prison inside me well into adulthood.

I knew that if I didn’t do something, we would break up, but much worse than that, I would carry these behaviors into every future relationship. I would spend my life ruled by uncontrollable sorrow and rage. I would waste my one wild and precious life.

I had all the emotions I had not been allowed to have as a child, because for the first time, I knew I was safe.

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.

They hold a mock funeral for “the good old days.” 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.

This pride comes from the same internal place as the delusion 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.

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.