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

by Michele Filgate

The more we face what we can’t or won’t or don’t know, the more we understand one another.

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.

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

Food is our first experience of care, a child psychiatrist tells me, when I go.

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.

Our younger daughter nursed much longer than I expected, until she was nearly two. I loved the ease of it, giving to her. She’d cry, I’d offer her a boob. She’d settle in, and all was good again. When I stopped nursing, I was afraid all of a sudden. All at once, there was no clear, clean way to give to her, no certain way to ensure that she’d calm down. When she needed, wanted, suffered, I had only my best guess: words, hugs, begging, asking, holding. I only had the flawed and abstract way that humans love.

I once had a therapist tell me I was just born to the wrong family. The “just” is hers, not mine. We have different values is a thing I sometimes tell people when they ask about my parents, but that sounds already more subjective, more judgmental, than I mean. We are very different, very separate people, who have both accid...

He gave her a hard time about having a dishwasher. What could be more bourgeoisie? As she tells me this, I think of how Sheila is always in the kitchen of their communal house in Peter’s novel—making a beef stew, or a Jell-O dessert, or dream bars. Even during their years of free love, someone had been doing the dishes. Now she just had a dishwasher.

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.