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

Mothers are idealized as protectors: a person who is caring and giving and who builds a person up rather than knocking them down. But very few of us can say that our mothers check all of these boxes.

I long for the mother I had before she met my stepfather,

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.

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.

Silence is what fills the gap between my mother and me. All of the things we haven’t said to each other, because it’s too painful to articulate. What I want to say: I need you to believe me. I need you to listen. I need you. What I say: nothing.

“I love you past the sun and the moon and the stars,” she’d always say to me when I was little. But I just want her to love me here. Now. On Earth.

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.

I’m afraid it would hurt her if I share with her that a part of me is reluctant to trust her gifts. I worry there are strings attached. More than that, it all feels like a betrayal of everything she’d trained me to believe in and to be. Deep down, I’m also afraid that if I speak up, the giving will stop.

I don’t fight her. I believe her and know that I’m not capable of doing anything right.

she said cruel things that lodged themselves in my brain and took decades to unhear.

If we were still spinning in the aftermath of her hurricane, she would ask us what was wrong. If we didn’t mirror her jubilance, the anger would return. So we learned to ignore our own feelings until we didn’t feel them anymore.

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

I would spend my life ruled by uncontrollable sorrow and rage. I would waste my one wild and precious life.

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.