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

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 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 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.

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.

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.

To say: Here is everything that keeps us from really talking. Here is my heart. Here are my words. I wrote this for you.

A daughter is wedded to her mother first.

couldn’t locate the specific feeling I’d had the last time we talked. I thought for a few hours after I cried in the bathroom that I would call her and I would tell her I loved her. But I did not trust calling her. I was afraid that if I called her, she would talk and it would be too hard for me to love her after that.

I think, ultimately, other people aren’t real to us until they’re suffering or gone. That’s when the imagination begins to work, trying to sort things out, trying to get them right, to understand them.

She’s happy. Don’t make her think she’s not.

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.

Hearing this, I get a flash of pride at the fact that Peter wanted to be with my mother more than she wanted to be with him. This pride comes from the same internal place as the delusion I spent much of my young adulthood believing: that it is better to be the one desired more, rather than the one doing more desiring. As if love were a contest; as if desire were fixed, or absolute; as if either position could insulate you from being harmed or causing harm; as if being in control could insulate you from anything.

This pride comes from the same internal place as the delusion I spent much of my young adulthood believing: that it is better to be the one desired more, rather than the one doing more desiring. As if love were a contest; as if desire were fixed, or absolute; as if either position could insulate you from being harmed or causing harm; as if being in control could insulate you from anything.

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

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.

I've spent enough time in Catholic churches to know what it means to sweep things underneath the rug.

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.

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.

It has been one of the greatest blessings of my life that my sister is able to mirror my experience.

A friend once told me that it was frankly a little bit exhausting to hear me talk about how much I loved my mother. But what can I say? My hunger for her feels endless.

His hands are worms, my body dirt.

I still want to believe that breathtaking literary work necessitates American men sentimentally naming the hurt we've done, sourcing that hurt to one trauma, and getting congratulated, often by women, for "our honesty" at reckoning with that trauma while neglecting the suffering we cause

To talk about her love for me, or mine for her, would feel almost tautological; she has always defined my notion of what love is. Just like it’s meaningless to say our ordinary days were everything to me, because they were me. They composed me. They still do. I don’t know any self that exists apart from them.

Erica! The voice of Bill Rivers that day on the street goes through my mother’s heart like a stake. Erica, he says. (She thinks he says.) Tell me, what did you do with your glittering mind? Did you make the right choice? Marry the right man? Would you have studied at the Sorbonne, Erica? Laughed with writers at Les Deux Magots? Did you lock up that dazzling wit of yours, or did you write a book? Did you get to stroll in Paris? Would you care if your daughter were a perfect doll of a brown baby? Who would you love, Erica? Who would you be?

Pensar en eso ahora me destroza. Pero no te gustan las lágrimas, así que las contuve hasta que nuestra niña regresó y tú te fuiste a casa, y entonces lloré por todas nosotras.