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

by Michele Filgate

I have noticed that in many, if not all, longtime marriages, there’s both pragmatism and some (healthy?) denial.

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

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

There is a difference between the fear of upsetting someone who loves you and the danger of losing them.

I had discovered the way everyone has an opinion when they discover you were sexually abused. Everyone seems to think immediately of how they’d have handled it better, and they expect you to answer their questions to confirm this. To come forward, especially if you’re a boy, is to be told you failed, implicitly, or even explicitly.

I won’t ever escape this way, but it feels like I do.

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.

My experience in this nation, in my state, in my city, in all sorts of American rooms, is far too funky, too smudged, too reliant on—and influenced by—concentric circles of violence to say that I harmed anyone in this country simply because of a singular experience of harm. I also can’t say anyone in this country harmed me because of a singular experience of childhood harm.

In my lifetime, my feelings about motherhood run the spectrum from ambivalent to eager. I love babies, their chubby legs and concerned faces and pugilist’s fists; I am actively distressed by toddlers, their lack of reason, their id-ness, their sociopathy; I love older children who can talk about school and the books they’re reading; and teenagers remain an utterly unknown—and intimidating—horizon. A hypochondriac, I am terrified of pregnancy and its medical risks. A hedonist, I don’t want to give up whiskey cocktails, sushi, soft cheeses.

This is how I survived my childhood: I disappeared.

I am very lucky that early and unknowingly, I found books instead of any other drug. I’ve never fully returned from that early dissociation. My deepest life has been spent inside books,

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

He wanted a love that was deep and peaceful.

In those early years of our relationship, I was a feral child in the arena of love. I wept, I screamed, I was insanely jealous.

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.

I could not have asked for a better partner in the lifework of love.

For the first time I felt like what I had experienced in childhood was not a fragment of my imagination.

This is the saddest part of our story. My mother remembers a different life than the one we’ve lived with her. The chasm between us is unbridgeable because she often, though not always, cannot remember why a loved one might be hurt and therefore need to emotionally and physically withdraw from her.

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.

Then slowly I can remember that I have made a different path for myself. I have found the ones who know my heart and keep it safe. I have created myself as someone who, on most days, I like, respect, and love. I have made my way into myself and learned that love, too, is contagious. I have learned that healing is possible. That we can make lives that we couldn’t even have imagined when we were little and that we can carry the little ones who we were into these new and luminous lives.

My mother before she was a mother has always lived in my mind as a collection of myths—half-invented, barely possible.

How many times has my mom picked up the phone to hear my voice cracked with tears, only letting it crack once I knew she was there?

I could finally understand how much she loved me, and I could hardly stand the grace of it.

I’ve always found the most moving part of that poem to be the stuttering pause created by the line break, the repetition of the pronoun—I / I—as if the speaker is trying to assure himself that his path was the right one. But there’s a break in his own voice that betrays his uncertainty.

In the aftermath of every breakup, it had been simultaneously comforting and deflating to hear her say it wasn’t the end of the world. Now I realized that wisdom hadn’t been entirely intuitive; it had also been a kind of muscle memory—something she might have wanted to tell that version of herself, from the past, the one who thought she’d ruined everything.

My ego and my mother’s ego are built in similar ways.

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.