What My Mother and I Don't Talk About

by Michele Filgate

  Mother Tongue

  By Carmen Maria Machado

  A few months before my wife, Val, and I got married, we decided to see a nonreligious couples counselor for a set of sessions meant to prep us for a life together. We wanted to start things off right—look for what we were missing, gather tools to help us succeed. Our therapist—an astute, hysterically funny woman named Michelle—was, I thought, precisely what we needed. She was thoughtful and found a way to artfully cut through each of our defenses—Val’s emotion, my retreat from it. (Recognizing what two oldest children needed from her, she gave us endless praise for our hard work, and a certificate when we ultimately graduated.) When we came to the discussion about children—there was an entire session dedicated to it, the premarital counseling version of Shark Week—I was surprised to find myself expressing ambivalence to parenthood.

  Val and I had talked about children, of course. As soon as it became clear that we were serious, we agreed that while we didn’t have to decide on the time line and method just then, we both wanted to be parents. When we became aunts to our two nephews, we got a preview of the experience of having kids in our lives: exhausting, messy, but funny and magical and something we definitely wanted.

  So in that room, when I said to my soon-to-be wife, “I don’t know if I want to have children,” I felt surprise, and then that pre-cry tingle in my sinuses. I repeated myself, hardly believing what was coming out of my mouth. “I don’t know if I want children.” I felt like I was going to start crying, and then I didn’t. I just sat there with the knowledge, knowledge that felt new even though it wasn’t at all.

  * * *

  In my lifetime, my feelings about motherhood run the spectrum from ambivalent to eager. I love babies, their chubby legs and concerned faces and pugilist’s fists; I am actively distressed by toddlers, their lack of reason, their id-ness, their sociopathy; I love older children who can talk about school and the books they’re reading; and teenagers remain an utterly unknown—and intimidating—horizon. A hypochondriac, I am terrified of pregnancy and its medical risks. A hedonist, I don’t want to give up whiskey cocktails, sushi, soft cheeses. A writer, I’m scared to relinquish writing time for child-rearing.

  When I was younger, I didn’t know if I wanted kids. Then, the first time I fell in love, at the tender age of twenty-three, a kind of hormonal switch flipped, and I went from uncertainty to cramping with want. I thought about having babies with an uncanny focus, even when I wasn’t dating anybody, even when I didn’t want to be pregnant. I had dream after dream about being pregnant. They were always the same: lying on my bed running my hand over a swollen belly, knowing that soon everything would change.

  * * *

  When I was a child, my love for my mother was uncomplicated. I was sick a lot, and because she didn’t work outside the home, she spent a lot of time ferrying me to doctors. When I was home, I’d watch soap operas with her—she loved All My Children—while she ironed or did aerobics. I think she adored this version of me, whose difficulties were, for all intents and purposes, childlike. She was a good mother for young children.

  My mom was one of nine kids—nine kids on a farm who never had anything of their own. She struggled with school but had a scrappy can-do attitude that took her to Florida when she was eighteen, far away from her native Wisconsin. She could be so funny and charming and kind. But her side of the family has always been marked with difficult personalities: stubbornness and self-righteousness. Traits that I, woefully, inherited.

  The older I got, the more complicated our relationship became. Every teen’s mother doesn’t get them, but it seemed—to me—that my mother didn’t get me the most. I was older and more complicated and my problems were older and more complicated. I didn’t need my mother, specifically, as much; I needed a complicated network of things: mental health support and a chemistry tutor and a job and a world that didn’t shame fat teens or hate women and a queer mentor and someone to help me apply for college and the recession to not start the same year I graduated. My siblings, too, began to grow into more mature and difficult versions of themselves, and we exited her orbit.

  My mom decided she wanted to go back to college to get her associate degree, which she did. After that, she bounced from job to job, trying to find her passion: real estate, special education, furniture restoration, retail. Nothing ever really stuck. As her frustration with her life mounted, I flourished in school, went to college, got my MFA. A vast and unbridgeable crevasse erupted between us. Whenever I saw her, she found some way to let me know that despite my accomplishments, I was failing. “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 couldn’t help her with that.

  * * *

  In the couple of months following graduate school, I moved home to southeastern Pennsylvania. Val and I—then girlfriends—were both job hunting from our respective parents’ houses, but her parents were much happier to have her. My own had several hissing fights about my presence: my father insisted that I was welcome any time, because they were my parents and they loved me, and my mother told me it was not my house, and she was only letting me stay because my father insisted. I know it’s not my house, I told her. As soon as Val and I got jobs and a place in Philadelphia, we’d be gone.

  I slept in an uncomfortable guest room, my brother’s former room, which was crammed with so much furniture there was nowhere to store a suitcase or walk. My mother forbade me from eating and drinking in there, because I might “make a mess.” She would open the bedroom door periodically to “check” on things, to make sure—I don’t know, that I wasn’t doing a blood sacrifice or taking up beekeeping in her guest room? If the bedsheets were flipped down or my pajamas were lying across the bedspread, I’d hear a bloodcurdling yell that moved around the house like a bird. The stereotype of Midwestern passive-aggressiveness has never really suited my mother; she needs to say something about everything, needs to fight. It’s something I’ve inherited from her, actually. It’s one of my worst, and best, traits.

  During the day, I hunted for jobs in Philadelphia and did freelance writing. The house was crowded with sounds (the news at full volume, my mom yelling at my father), so I sat on the back porch and worked, listening to the birds and the distant thunk of soccer balls. Periodically, my mother would come outside and look at me. “You can’t just sit there,” she said. “You have to find a job.”

  “I’m working,” I’d say, and gesture to my computer.

  “What was the point of all of that fancy graduate school,” she asked, “if you can’t find a job?”

  It was such an odd question because it both saw to the heart of my anxiety—what was I going to do post–graduate school?—and also reflected how little she knew or understood about me and my life. I tried to explain the work to her—I was earning $35 an hour just “sitting there,” and why would I apply for jobs here when I was moving to Philadelphia?—but she didn’t seem to believe or understand me, as if work was one singular thing, and if I wasn’t folding clothes or pushing a broom in my hometown, I wasn’t truly working. She circled arbitrary jobs in the wanted ads from the local paper—did I want to be a school bus driver? A telemarketer? What about data entry?—and left them next to me. I got very good at theatrically chucking the newsprint into the trash can.

  “How are you going to pay back those student loans if you don’t get a job?” she asked.

  “I’ve never missed a payment,” I said. “And I have a job.”

  “You’re never going to pay back those student loans, and then, you know, your father and I are on the hook for them. Did you know that?”

  And around and around we went. A reader might think that this is, obviously, a kind of misplaced parental anxiety and love. And they might be right. But I felt like I was losing my mind. There was no trust, no affection, no listening, just ignorant micromanagement. It felt like I was existing in a paralle
l universe where everything I’d just done with my life, everything I was doing with my life, hadn’t made any difference at all. I was a kid again, useless. Nothing was mine—not my time, not my schedule, not my choices. (If you oversleep, you won’t get a job / if you go visit your girlfriend too much, you won’t get a job / did you know you need a job to pay back your student loans / why did you go to school if you can’t get a job to pay back your student loans . . . .)

  “Don’t think you can just stay here,” she said to me one afternoon. “Don’t think you can just move in here and live in this house.”

  “If you think for one second,” I said, “that I want to stay in this demented, hellish, Kinkadian nightmare of a house with you breathing down my neck, instead of living in Philadelphia with my girlfriend, you are really and truly insane.”

  She set her jaw hard and didn’t say anything. I couldn’t tell what she wanted from me, except to get as far away from her as humanly possible. So I did.

  * * *

  Toward the end of my time at my parents’ house, Val visited me. She was making headway on the job hunt, and we missed each other. Not wanting to deal with my mother, we sat up in my room, drinking seltzer water and eating popcorn and watching a movie on my laptop. Downstairs, my mother caught wind of the indiscretion, the breaking of her no-food-and-drink rule—the smell of popcorn, maybe, or that parental sixth sense—and she started to scream. Her voice wafted up the stairs, reedy and enraging. I heard her talking to my father, in the way that she always did when I was a kid—a harsh conversation meant to be overheard, to induce shame. I was ungrateful, she said. I was useless and disrespectful. I didn’t belong here and she wanted me to leave.

  Something inside of me popped, the way it does when you throw out your back. I was, I realized, up against an immovable, illogical object, and I might as well lose my shit because being reasonable and thoughtful wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I came downstairs with the popcorn and stood in front of my mother.

  “You are a nightmare,” I told her. “You’re ignorant and bitter and you and this house are a living nightmare. You’re a miserable human being, and that is your right, but I refuse to be miserable with you.”

  “You’re selfish,” she said. “You’re selfish and stuck-up and you think everything belongs to you.”

  “Yup,” I said, and very calmly poured the popcorn on the floor.

  She got up and left the room. After she was gone, I scooped linty popcorn off the carpet and then dumped it all in the trash, then went upstairs and went to bed. The next morning, Val and I drove to Philadelphia and stayed at a friend’s apartment. We moved there a few weeks later; Val got a full-time job, and I pieced together part-time jobs: adjuncting, retail, freelancing. We made it work; it has worked ever since.

  But I relished that moment—that moment in which I’d finally made the mess she always thought I’d make. It was satisfying, in its own way, to fulfill her expectations so neatly, knowing I’d never have to do it again.

  * * *

  My mother and I do not speak anymore. It didn’t start at that moment, with the popcorn, but that was the beginning of something—a realization that I had choices about how to live my life, and one of them was her not being in it. It’s been five years, now. She didn’t come to my wedding—I had to “repair our relationship” before she would deign to attend, she said over email, and I never even bothered replying. The word, I guess, is “estranged,” and there is indeed something strange about it: I think of her distantly, like someone I knew from an intro-to-biology class my first semester in college, instead of the woman who raised me.

  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.

  * * *

  So, parenthood. I am stopped short by any number of concerns, ranging from practical ones—the cost—to selfish ones—my wife’s and my careers and our enjoyment of each other—to illogical ones—the idea that my one-day child might grow up and write an essay about me in an anthology called What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About II, and I might only then have a clear, bird’s-eye view of my own faults and foibles.

  I think my mom wanted to live a selfish existence. I do not think she imagined herself struggling to find her identity in her forties, fifties, sixties. And I don’t blame her. I want to be selfish, too. I want to write books and travel and sleep in late. I want to cook weird, complicated meals and have unadulterated time with my wife. The difference between us—besides the fact that she made her choice, and I have yet to make mine—is that with my wife, the act of making a baby is by definition purposeful. We have to save money, pick sperm, go through complicated and expensive and invasive procedures to become parents. We cannot accidentally stumble into parenthood the way straight couples do. And it’s better that way, I think. No oops, followed by a lifelong hydra of anger that cannot be managed or maintained. But of course this is the kind of problem where you can’t learn from one way and choose another. You’re a parent, or you’re not.

  This is what my mother and I don’t talk about: That it is not my fault she is so profoundly unhappy with her life. That she had a chance to know me—really know me, as an adult and an artist and a human being—and she blew it. That I have not regretted our estrangement for one single second; in fact, I keep waiting for the regret to appear and being surprised when it doesn’t. That I feel bad for her that she is so dissatisfied with her own life; I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. That I miss what we had when I was a kid, but I’m not a kid anymore, and I will never be again. And that the thing that keeps me from tackling parenthood with eagerness is not, really, money or ambition or hypochondria or selfishness. Rather, it’s the fear that I’ve learned less from my childhood than I should have, that I am more like her than I want to be.

  Are You Listening?

  By André Aciman

  I always knew my mother couldn’t hear, but I can’t remember when it dawned on me that she’d always be deaf. If I was told, I didn’t believe it. It was no different when I learned about sex. Someone may have sat me down for the facts of life, and although I wasn’t really shocked and probably already knew, I couldn’t bring myself to trust any of it. In between knowing something and refusing to know it lies a murky chasm that even the most enlightened among us are perfectly happy to inhabit. If anyone gave me the official report on my mother, it would have been my grandmother, who did not like her daughter-in-law and who found my mother’s deaf friends as repellent as ungainly fowls squawking in her son’s living room. If it wasn’t my grandmother, it would have been the way people made fun of my mother on the street.

  Some men whistled when she walked by, because she was beautiful and sexy and had a way of looking you boldly in the face until you lowered your eyes. But when she shopped and spoke with the monotonous, guttural voice of the deaf, people laughed. In Alexandria, Egypt, where we lived until we were summarily exiled, like all of the country’s Jews, that’s what you did when someone was different. It wasn’t full-throated laughter; it was derision, the stepchild of contempt, which is as mirthless as it is cruel. She couldn’t hear their laughter, but she read it in their faces. This must be how she finally understood why people always smirked when she thought she was speaking like everyone else. Who knows how long it took her to realize that she was unlike other children, why some turned away, or others, meaning to be kind, had a diffident way when they allowed her to play with them?

  Born in Alexandria in 1924 in the wake of British colonial rule, my mother belonged to a middle-cl
ass, French-speaking Jewish family. Her father had done well as a bicycle merchant and spared no expense to find a cure for her deafness. Her mother took her to see the most prominent audiologists in Europe but returned more disheartened after each appointment. There was, the doctors said, no cure. Her child had lost her hearing to meningitis when she was a few months old, and from meningitis there was no coming back. Her ears were healthy, but meningitis had touched the part of her brain responsible for hearing.

  In those days, there was nothing resembling deaf pride. Deafness was a stigma. The very poor often neglected their deaf children, condemning them to a lifetime of menial labor. Children remained illiterate, and their language was primitive, gestural. In the snobbish view of my mother’s parents, if you couldn’t cure deafness, you learned to hide it. If you weren’t ashamed of it, you were taught to be. You learned how to lip-read, not sign; you learned to speak with your voice, not your hands. You didn’t eat with your hands; why on earth would you speak with them?

  My mother was initially enrolled in a Jewish French day school, but within weeks her parents and the teachers realized that the school couldn’t accommodate a deaf child, so she was shipped off to a specialized school in Paris, overseen by nuns. It turned out to be more of a finishing school than a school for the deaf. She was taught good posture by walking with a book on her head and by holding books between her elbows and her waist when she sat at a dinner table. She picked up sewing, knitting, and needlepoint. But she was a volatile, rambunctious child and had grown into a tomboy who collected bicycles from her father’s shop. She didn’t like to play with dolls. She had no patience for French savoir faire or for French grace and deportment.