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

“When she arrived in the hospital after my daughter was born, I sat there on the starched sheets holding my baby, and she held me, and I cried uncontrollably— because I could finally understand how much she loved me, and I could hardly stand the grace of it.”

“To talk about her love for me, or mine for her, would feel almost tautological; she has always defied my notion of what love is.”

“She loved to tell stories. She believed in magic. Nobody stood up for her so she had to stand up for herself, and after a while, she got tired of standing. I wish I had gotten to know her better.”

“It’s strange, really, that to grasp that which has hurt you, you must trust it not to hurt you when you let it inhabit you. Do you know about baptism? How they hold you and lower you into the water? It’s like that. You have to trust they’ll lift you out.”

“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 space for her to be a person. I think, ultimately, other people aren’t real to us until they’re suffering or gone.”

“… slowly I can remember that I have made a different path for myself... I have created myself as someone who, on most days, I like, respect, and love… I have learned that healing is possible. That we can make lives that we couldn’t have even imagined when we were little and that we can carry the little ones who we were into these new and luminous lives.”

“I know my parents love and miss me. I, too, deeply mourn all that we lost. But I have reached the bottom of my own particular well. There is compassion here but not much hope for connection beyond that.”

“The burden of the unsaid turns my heart into a balled fist.”

“… the behaviors that let me survive childhood were not serving me anymore…”

“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. It was a very conscious act.”