Briahna’s Reviews > What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence > Status Update

“I was used to being spoken to like an adult. I hated it when other grown-ups treated me like a child.”

“your mother never knew when to let things go. You said she never hit you, but you wished she had—because you would have preferred a slap to the nagging.”

“It used to scare me that I wanted things my mother wouldn’t understand. I think we both feared our difference.”

“I imagine that this is the way a man feels leaving his family for his mistress. I did feel part father, part husband. Maybe every daughter does. Or just the ones whose fathers have gone.”

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

“it also frustrated me, the constant claims on her time. I’d think, ‘What about me?’ Though sometimes I also thought, ‘Maybe she doesn’t want to hang out with me.’ After all, I can be intense, talky, opinionated”

“‘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.”

“I can play with existing and not existing inside my bedroom; my room is a place to be myself and not myself.”

“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.
My mother is hard to know. Or rather, I know her and don’t know her at the same time.”

“It felt like the whole world was burning. It felt like I had set fire to my own life. To live with the pain of my strained relationship with my mother is one thing. To immortalize it in words is a whole other level. There’s something deeply lonely about confessing your truth.”