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What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About by Michele Filgate

Mothers. At least for an instant, everyone has one. No mother is perfect, but some know how to mother more than others.

Sometimes a mother-child relationship is a bitch. Sometimes it’s beautiful, sometimes bitter-sweet.

But it’s always complicated.

In the essay collection What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About: Fifteen Readers Break the Silence (Simon & Schuster), edited by Michele Filgate, fifteen writers share their personal stories about the complexity of their relationships with their mothers. Just hearing the title pulls many of us into a state of emotional turbulence. Don’t most of us have something we wish we could tell our mothers, but haven’t?

As Filgate admits, confessing personal truth and living with the pain of a strained relationship is hard enough, but releasing it into the world creates a vulnerability that might feel like setting your own life on fire. Will people judge? What will your mother think? It took Filgate fourteen years to write her essay.

These writers finally break their silence, sharing with readers the words they could never share with their moms. Amid the pain of admission and recollection is their ability to command their own stories and possibly mend the relationships with their mothers and themselves.

This collection explores what it means to be a “good daughter” or “good son.” Is it being quiet, not telling? Not talking about things better swept under the carpet or kept beneath worn floorboards? Who will be hurt by the telling, or the keeping of secrets?

There is pain when a child realizes their mother is lacking—acknowledging the gap between the idealized version of the ultimate protector and supporter, and reality. The confession of what is missing. That truth is amplified at certain times, like Mother’s Day. Celebrating the women who gave us life can be appreciative and joyous but also distressing. The contradiction between the mother we wish we had and the mother we were born to is sometimes so stark the celebration might as well be a fairy tale.

Some of these writers have very close relationships with their mothers; others are fractured. Some have problems with the physicality of communicating; others communicate too much. Some relationships are filled with longing, some with disturbing memories. Some stories are tender with the quiet of secrets; others are loud screams within the chaos of mental illness. Several involve the denial of abuse—physical, emotional, or sexual; others talk of false accusations. Some truths belong to the writers; others belong to their mothers.

All come from the heart.

This collection of poignant essays serves as an instrument to break the silence, of speaking the truth about these authors’ relationships with the women who raised them. It is a plea to open the lines of communication, to mend those rickety, impassable, or disintegrating bridges of understanding.

And they ask the question: what do you yearn to tell your mother?

What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About is available for purchase.

 

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What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About by Michele Filgate
Genre: Nonfiction
Author: Michele Filgate
K.L. Romo

K. L. Romo writes about life on the fringe: teetering dangerously on the edge is more interesting than standing safely in the middle. She is passionate about women’s issues, loves noisy clocks and fuzzy blankets, but HATES the word normal. She blogs about books at Romo's Reading Room. For more, visit klromo.com, @klromo on Twitter and @k.l.romo on Instagram.

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