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

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.

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.

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.