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

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. In many ways, a mother is set up to fail. “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,” Lynn Steger Strong writes in this book.

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.

“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.

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

I did feel part father, part husband. Maybe every daughter does. Or just the ones whose fathers have gone.

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

she was my daughter, but she was our girl.

When he beat her up the first time, she got on a bus and went home. The part of the story I couldn’t bear—and still can’t—is that her mother sent her back to him.

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.

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.

What I cannot tell my mother is that she hurt me and I’m angry,

She was a good mother for young children.

The stereotype of Midwestern passive-aggressiveness has never really suited my mother; she needs to say something about everything, needs to fight.

But I felt like I was losing my mind. There was no trust, no affection, no listening, just ignorant micromanagement.

The word, I guess, is “estranged,” and there is indeed something strange about it: I think of her distantly, like someone I knew from an intro-to-biology class my first semester in college, instead of the woman who raised me.

That I miss what we had when I was a kid, but I’m not a kid anymore, and I will never be again. And that the thing that keeps me from tackling parenthood with eagerness is not, really, money or ambition or hypochondria or selfishness. Rather, it’s the fear that I’ve learned less from my childhood than I should have, that I am more like her than I want to be.

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.

The problem was that she saw no difference between her body and my body. I belonged to her completely. I was both her best, beloved precious child and a useless piece of shit.

Constantly, I wavered between these two understandings of myself, never sure where to land, always looking for evidence as to what I was.

My mother was the queen and we were her loyal subjects. Any assertion of individual identity was an indication of abandonment, a sign that we did not love her. When she thought that we did not love her, the queen disappeared and the witch arrived.

My mother screamed, she smashed dishes until there wasn’t a single unbroken plate in the house, she said cruel things that lodged themselves in my brain and took decades to unhear.

She could go from crying uncontrollably to laughing in minutes. 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.

In the aftermath of her own rages, when she had alienated loved ones or broken property, my mother used to call me crying. She’d say over and over, “I’m not crazy.” It translates to “Don’t lock me up. Don’t throw away the key.”

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.

Often my entire body hurt before I called her but I ignored this. If I didn’t talk her down, terrible things could happen. I was sure that if I just found the right tool for her—meditation, a book, a counselor that she liked—she would be happy. I would save her. It was all up to me. I had escaped the prison walls of my childhood but

I carried that prison inside me well into adulthood.

Co-Dependents Anonymous, which showed me that the behaviors that let me survive childhood were not serving me anymore; and the guidance of a skilled therapist who reparented me into adulthood.

The other thing that saved me was being in a long-term romantic relationship. I tantrummed for years and when I was done, Whit was still there. With him 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. Some deep part of me recognized that I could trust him, even though I didn’t consciously believe this until years later. He came into our relationship with understanding and compassion already in his bloodline, and I co...

“Children of borderlines have been down the rabbit hole. They have heard the Queen of Hearts order everyone beheaded. They have attended the mad tea party and argued with the Duchess for the right to think their own thoughts. They grow weary of feeling big one minute and small the next.”1

I think that I understand my mother so much better now. I know that even as she hurts people she is hurting exponentially more.

“The greatest protection the adult child of a borderline has is the ability to leave.”3

“Studies show that chronically intense emotions damage the part of the brain responsible for memory . . . . Because the borderline mother is unable to remember intensely emotional events, she is unable to learn from experience [my italics]. She may repeat destructive behaviors without remembering previous consequences.”4

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.

So much had happened that we normalized what others would not and forgot what most other people would not forget.

That was my breaking point. If they weren’t willing to save their own lives, I wasn’t going to drown with them.

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 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.

The thing that kept me from writing about her, about grief, in fiction was that I lacked genuine, human feeling for my mother. Or, no, that’s not true exactly. What I lacked was empathy for her. I was so interested in my own feelings about her that I couldn’t leave room for her feelings or for what she wanted out of life. I couldn’t leave a space for her to be a person.

What can I tell you about my relationship with my mom? For many years of my childhood, it was just the two of us.

“You can only turn yourself out so far, to be what another person wants you to be.”

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.