What My Mother and I Don't Talk About Fifteen Writers Break the Silence
Reviews
it was nice but not as nice as i thought, didn’t cry once which was not i was expecting and the last story was the worst to me and there’s no stand outs for me but it was still beautifully written
I found all of these at least good, and a few even great, but as a whole not as transformative as some reviews may have led me to anticipate. I imagine individual response to this will be deeply personal, and while my own is rather surface-level, I am glad to have read it.
What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About is an anthology of fifteen different stories about each writers personal experience with their mother, and or a topic they don’t discuss. Some of this essays, specifically the one by Michelle and Brandon Taylor, literally made me want to sob. In most of these essays, I could find some way to relate it back to the relationship that I have with my own mother. Some of the essays are lighter and contain humor, while others express deep family trauma that made me want to curl into a ball. There were only a few I didn’t care for or felt that they missed the point–but all in all i would highly recommend this anthology!
“The closer the mother and the daughter are, they say, the more violent the daughter’s work to free herself.”
this healed something very specific in me. cries in mommy issues, knowing that it'll either get better or worse.
wow
It’s a good compilation of essays about the writers and their relationships with their mothers. Mostly about things that were never said. Some relationships are amazing, some bad and some doesn’t exist anymore. It’s a good book to put in perspective our relationships with our mothers.
I appreciate the honesty and vulnerability. Great essays, but the stories weren't really that cohesive. Quotes: "I’m always happy to see mothers celebrated, but there’s a part of me that finds it painful too. There is a huge swath of people who are reminded on this day of what is lacking in their lives—for some, it’s the intense grief that comes with losing a mother too soon or never even knowing her. For others, it’s the realization that their mother, although alive, doesn’t know how to mother them." “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.” “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.” “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.” "There’s a relief in breaking the silence. This is also how we grow. Acknowledging what we couldn’t say for so long, for whatever reason, is one way to heal our relationships with others and, perhaps most important, with ourselves." "There is a difference between the fear of upsetting someone who loves you and the danger of losing them. For a long time, I couldn’t separate them. It has taken me some work to discern the difference between the pain of hurting those I love and my fear of what I might lose. Hurting those we love is survivable. It is inevitable. I wish that I could have done less of it. But no matter how much of it I did, I would never have lost her. "
*3.5* My favorite stories were: - Thesmophoria by Melissa Febos - 16 Minetta Lane by Dylan Landis - Fifteen by Bernice L. McFadden - Mother Tongue by Carmen Maria Machado
favorites: - thesmophoria by melissa febos - the same story about my mom by lynn steger strong - her body/my body by nayomi munaweera - all about my mother by brandon taylor
girls when media captures the complex relationship between mother and child
While each essay was interesting and made me reflect a lot, it all still felt really dry. There wasn't much of a clear point or theme to them and none were very notable for me.
some essays were better than others
4.5 💐
3.5☆
Highlights
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.
The secrets hidden in me could fill that lake, but don't. They leave with me.
fourth essay-eye opening, i’m proud of him
On any given day I felt like a freak, too visible in the weong way, which is the same as not being seen.
fourth essay :/
I hurt myself and I hurt her over and over.
third essay❤️🩹❤️🩹
Take love, for another example, which to some people is expressed via touch or via words or some other means of affection. In my family, love was the slow accumulation of moments in which I was not subjected to great harm.
What is love if you get it secondhand? Is it a fact or merely a detail?
But lately, I've begun to wonder if this isn't just my feeling as the baby of the family, the brat, the pain in the neck. Al those years, I thought I was playing a trick on my dad, by pretending I wasn't there, by holding myself back, thinking myself invisible.
How like the selfish child to think that he's the one in charge, and to miss entirely that a father might pretend not to see you if he knew it would bring you joy to sneak up on him.
You miss a lot in first sight.
“There is a difference between the fear of upsetting someone who loves you and the danger of losing them. For a long time, I couldn’t separate them.”
ouch
Rather, it's the fear that I’ve learned less from my childhood than I should have, that l am more like her than I want to be.
"I don't know what she makes of me, now. Everything I am is proof that she was wrong about me, and yet the woman I've known for my entire life does not apologize, does not admit to fault. I believe that she loves me, in the same way that I believe that it's best that we are not a part of each other's lives. Because my identity has been shaped by what she is not; she is, for me, an example of how not to conduct a life. I believe that her pride in my accomplishments - and her love for me - is actively battling her resentment, but I don't want to oversee that civil war, and I don't have to."
- mother tongue, carmen maria machado
“You need to learn to make better choices," she told me, though what choices they were, she never specified. Besides, all I could hear was, ‘I wish I’d made better choices.’ And I couldnt help her with that.
carmen maria machado
Now that I have thought about all of it, and shared it with you, how will we allow all of it, all the whiles, any of the whiles, to make us better at loving us backward and forward? That is the only question that matters to me right now. Can you tell me what questions matter to you? Can we spend the rest of our lives talking about those questions?
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.
Storytelling is a fight against forgetting, against loss and even mortality. Every 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.
The storyteller is a survivor, after all.
Like my ancestors, I believe that stories can save us. Our stories are our greatest currency. What one person is willing to share with another is a test of intimacy, a gift that's given.
My memories of him are still another color from the rest, as if they were all lived in another dimension.
All of my violences might be seen this way: a descent, a rise, a sowing. If we sow them, every sacrifice can become a harvest.
Lies make fools of the people we love. It's a careful equation, protecting them at the cost of your betrayal. Like mortgaging the house again to pay for the car. I was also, always, protecting myself. There were things I would no longer be able to believe if I had to say them aloud.
But wasnt my mother also my beloved, my captor? Wasn’t it against her arms that I fought most viciously? Like the Spartan bride, my heart would have broken if she had truly let me go. A daughter is wedded to her mother first.
It is so painful to be loved sometimes. Intolerable, even. I had to refuse her.
I don't know how it feels to create a body with your own. Maybe I never will. I remember, though, how it felt to be a daughter of a daughter, the distance between our bodies first none, then some.
The dread I felt did not rise from my thoughts but from my gut, from some corporeal logic that had kept meticulous track of every mistake before this one. That believed there was a finite number of times one could break someone's heart before it hardened to you.
Our mothers are our first homes, and that's why we're always trying to return to them.