What My Mother and I Don't Talk About

by Michele Filgate

  We were part of the first wave of Sri Lankan Americans, a tiny community of islanders in the suburbs of Los Angeles. If you saw us then, you would have seen the perfect immigrant family. You would have seen people who had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

  Consider my father: In Nigeria he had been a respected professional. In America his first job included rolling through raw sewage in flood control channels balanced on his stomach on a small wheeled board. From there he rose in the ranks of Los Angeles County until he was a very prominent engineer, an almost unbelievable life trajectory for a boy from a small Sri Lankan village.

  Consider my mother: this girl who never went to college. In Nigeria she had been the principal of her own school. In California she started over as a preschool teacher. She opened the school at 6 a.m. and closed it at 6 p.m. and then she went home to cook and clean. Over two decades she saved up enough to buy a preschool and then another. She remade herself as a business owner, a homeowner.

  In America, we knew we had to be very, very good. Americans often looked at us with suspicion. Sometimes they said we spoke English well and it was supposed to be a compliment. They didn’t seem to know that we had been born with the language in our mouths because of a certain cruel history, so we smiled and said thank you. Other times they got angry and shouted that we should go home, and we knew that only perfection would convince them that we, too, were human.

  We were tenacious, thrifty, and hardworking. Always we looked so good. My mother in a sari, my father in a suit with a tie that matched her sari, their two pretty daughters. How we glittered and dazzled at the immigrant parties that were the whole of our social life in that strange place, Sri Lanka in Los Angeles, Colombo meeting Hollywood. It was important to shine in this small community of two hundred families. Not doing so meant risking being ostracized, and who could survive in the wilds of America without the balm of one’s own people?

  Inside the House

  My mother was the queen and we were her loyal subjects. Any assertion of individual identity was an indication of abandonment, a sign that we did not love her. When she thought that we did not love her, the queen disappeared and the witch arrived.

  When we sensed her mood shifting toward darkness, we would whisper to each other, “Coming colors no good.” This was shorthand to describe something unnamed and insidious. My mother screamed, she smashed dishes until there wasn’t a single unbroken plate in the house, she said cruel things that lodged themselves in my brain and took decades to unhear. She broke the framed wedding pictures so many times that we stopped having them reframed. She locked herself in the bathroom and wept and wept. Sometimes she went silent for days. She could go from crying uncontrollably to laughing in minutes. If we were still spinning in the aftermath of her hurricane, she would ask us what was wrong. If we didn’t mirror her jubilance, the anger would return. So we learned to ignore our own feelings until we didn’t feel them anymore.

  * * *

  I’m fourteen and my mother has been raging for hours. My father, my sister, and I have been watching TV, either Gilligan’s Island or The Three Stooges, our favorite shows then and an easy way to anesthetize. Now it is suspiciously quiet so I go to check. She’s in the bathroom, a long deep slash across her wrist. There’s blood in the sink, on the wall. She’s dazed, incoherent, babbling. I wash the blood off her wrists, bind the wound tightly with bandages we keep in the cabinet. I ask her why, but she doesn’t answer. I put her to bed. I never talk to my dad about it and my sister at eight is too young; she has already seen more than she should.

  It’s about a year or so later; my mother is in the kitchen. She has found out that my father has yet again secretly sent money to his sister and mother in Sri Lanka. She shouts at him for hours, and my sister and I are in our rooms trying to pretend that nothing is happening. We hear her cry out and when we rush in, we see streaks of pink all over the floor. He has taken the rusted tin of sugar and brought it down hard on her head. Her skin has split, blood welling and gushing. Together they go to the hospital where they will say that she hit her head on a cabinet. I send my weeping sister to her room. I clean up the blood, the glistening sugar, the pink swirls where they have mixed. I think, this is my mother’s blood, and feel woozy. By the time they come home the kitchen is clean.

  When it was particularly bad, I would take my sister and we would leave. It didn’t matter how late it was; we would wander through those empty suburban streets. Often we would leave so quickly we were barefoot, the concrete cooling under our feet. In the park we would swing up toward the moon, drunk with the freedom of being outside while the other kids were all in bed. We would steal into gardens and pluck roses, hydrangeas, lilies. Hours later I would slip up to our door and put my ear to it. If there was still screaming, we would keep walking. We would only come back when they were asleep. We would fill all the vases in the house with stolen flowers. The scent would permeate the house and perfume our dreams. In the morning my father would lecture us for stealing other people’s property. He was always so concerned about other people, how we looked to them, what we stole from them. He never seemed to care about what was taken from us.

  A Bad Arranged Marriage

  Outside the house we were perfect. Inside the house we were sometimes tranquil, sometimes happy. Other times, perhaps much less often, we were terrified. The problem was that we never knew which mother we would have, which parents we would have: the predictable parents who made us study and who we knew loved us, or the ones who violently raged at each other and caught us up in their maelstrom. We were experts in reading their moods, always on guard for the moment when the darkness returned.

  I knew from very early on that the problem was a bad arranged marriage. My mother told me that she had been married off too young to a terrible man ten years older than her. She told me all about how badly my father treated her, how he didn’t love her, how much she hated him. It was confusing sometimes because I knew that I looked like him, that I had inherited many of his qualities, and that he was often sweet to me. She hated him and I was half him, so I also knew that some part of myself was disgusting, worthy of hatred. I also knew it was my job to make peace between my parents and keep them safe from each other.

  Divorce was unthinkable. Our unspoken agreement was that my parents should never have been married but now that they had and now that we, the children, had arrived, there was no escape for any of us.

  When we arrived in America, I realized that divorce was normalized; there were even Sri Lankans we knew who had gotten divorced and had started new lives. There was some stigma but it wasn’t impossible the way it had been in South Asia and in Africa. At thirteen I told my parents they should get divorced. I was astounded when they did not. It took me decades to understand that the narrative of a bad arranged marriage was only a veil for something far harder to see.

  Scar

  Over the years, often due to me begging, or threatening to cut off contact, my mother has gone to therapy. But always, in about the fourth month, when the hard work of introspection starts, she leaves.

  There’s also a cultural reason for her distrust. Traditionally South Asian families consider mental health problems shameful, possibly contagious. When my mother was a teenager, the prettiest cousin of her generation started having what sounds like psychotic fits. Her parents took her abroad for treatment but when none of it seemed to work, they returned to Sri Lanka and locked her away in the family house. People knew she was in the house—they could even hear her shouting upstairs—but no one was allowed to see her. This internment lasted for three decades. In certain South Asian communities the madwoman in the attic is not just a Gothic horror story but is a distinct possibility for a woman undergoing psychological problems. In the aftermath of her own rages, when she had alienated loved ones or broken property, my mother used to call me crying. She’d say over and over, “I’m not crazy.” It translates to “Don’t lock me up. Don’t throw away the key.”

  Instead
of therapy my mother puts her faith in ritual. As children we were repeatedly taken to the temple where a Hindu priest held up a hundred limes one by one to our foreheads and sliced through them with a cutter. The juice was supposed to squirt into the evil eye of those unknown enemies who were causing us unhappiness. To this day my mother will email and ask if she can send us good-luck charms blessed by holy men. She says she has had our horoscopes read and that I must wear pink, my sister must wear gold to keep us safe from malignant influences. She is perpetually hopeful that if we just adhered to these constantly changing rules, we would be a happy family.

  When I was seventeen, my parents took us to rural India to the enormous ashram of their guru, Sai Baba, a holy man who has millions of devotees around the world. We lived in a family shed, a huge crowded structure. We slept on mats on the floor and ate in a giant cafeteria. We woke at 3:30 a.m. and my mother, my sister, and I sat on the ground, on the female side, hundreds of thousands of women all around us in the predawn dark, waiting for the guru to emerge. When he came out, the women burst into song. As he swept past us my mother handed him a letter detailing all her woes. She wept with devotion as he took it from her.

  I didn’t give a shit about the guru. I hated the place, the rules, the food. I hated the segregation of men and women. I had a boyfriend in America but other cute boys lived in our shed, including two brothers from South Africa. While my parents napped in the midday heat, I went to their corner and we sat on the ground cutting mangoes. When one of them flipped the knife into the air, I instinctively reached out to catch it and the blade sank deep into the meat of the two middle fingers on my right hand almost to the bone. The blood came quick and fast.

  All I could think about was how angry my mother would be. I begged the boys and their parents not to tell her. I clutched a toilet-paper roll and then another and turned them soggy. I bled down the front of my yellow shalwar chemise. People gathered all around me; old women were whispering that I had been punished for speaking to boys. Someone told my mother and when she came, her face was cold and angry. She didn’t say anything to me. She turned and walked away. Someone wrapped up my hand, and my father walked with me to the hospital. At the door of that crowded, chaotic place we realized he couldn’t come inside with me because the building was gender segregated, so I walked the halls of that hospital where I didn’t speak the language alone. Eventually I found a doctor to sew me up. She was a surgeon and she only had huge, black internal-medicine thread so that after she was finished, my two fingers looked like a row of enormous spiders were holding my skin together.

  When I returned from the hospital, my mother ignored me. I had defied the queen and therefore I didn’t exist. Her angry silence went on for days. Twenty-eight years later, I still have the scar of that cut. It reminds me of how it feels to need comfort and instead find rage. 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.

  Surviving

  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. I am very lucky that early and unknowingly, I found books instead of any other drug. I’ve never fully returned from that early dissociation. My deepest life has been spent inside books, both in the consumption and later in the creation of them, and in this way perhaps my mother’s condition has been the primary shaping force in my life.

  As an adolescent I saw that our Sri Lankan–Angeleno community looked like the perfect model minority, but behind the manicured lawns, the luxury cars, and multiple degrees were various levels of rot. Daughters I knew whispered that their fathers had touched them and everyone shushed them up. Girls I knew were married off to men twenty-five years their senior by their mothers and no one intervened. As long as you achieved the American dream, nothing that happened inside these houses mattered.

  In this atmosphere I learned to lie. It astounds me how quickly this happened. At twelve she was wiping my butt and five years later I was sneaking out of the house to have sex with my first boyfriend. By American standards my behavior was normal. By Sri Lankan standards I was out of control. Mothers told their daughters not to talk to me. An uncle called my parents and said I had been seen with a boy. My parents tried to reassert control but it was too late and soon after I left home for college.

  In the years after, I consistently chose partners who were less emotionally healthy than me. I knew the savior role intimately. Even though I had left home and moved to the Bay Area, I would visit my parents’ house often. When my mother went to Sri Lanka for vacations, I would go to LA and run her business for months. I lived in her house, wore her clothes, essentially became her. When I was back in the Bay, I would talk to her on the phone almost daily. She told me her troubles; often she sobbed. I would modulate my voice into a peaceful tone that I didn’t use with anyone else. I would talk quietly and gently. Often my entire body hurt before I called her but I ignored this. If I didn’t talk her down, terrible things could happen. I was sure that if I just found the right tool for her—meditation, a book, a counselor that she liked—she would be happy. I would save her. It was all up to me. I had escaped the prison walls of my childhood but I carried that prison inside me well into adulthood.

  Saving My Own Life

  I met the man who would eventually become my husband in 2007. Whit was the first person to tell me that my childhood sounded dysfunctional, that I almost always cried after talking to my mother, that I returned from trips home emotionally wrecked and in physical pain, and that every single time he and I planned a trip, I had to cancel or almost cancel because my parents had gotten into a violent fight or one of them had threatened suicide. I had barely registered these events as unusual. Yes, my family was chaotic, but what could I do? To his concerns, I said, “You don’t understand. You’re white. This is just how it works in South Asian families.”

  I loved this man but I didn’t understand him. He wanted a love that was deep and peaceful. But if you didn’t rage, wasn’t that a sign that you didn’t love each other? I spent the first part of our relationship waiting for him to shout at me. It took about four years before I realized he just never was going to do that. I was astounded by this realization. It took many more years to relax into this safety.

  In those early years of our relationship, I was a feral child in the arena of love. I wept, I screamed, I was insanely jealous. If he spent time with friends, let alone a girl, my entire body flew into panic and pain; I felt like I was going to die. One day we spent the morning together and he said he was going to watch football with his friends and would see me for dinner. After he left I sat in my car and scream-cried for three hours. I was hysterical, but by the time he was available again I was perfectly fine. I scared myself that day. I knew something was very wrong. I knew that if I didn’t do something, we would break up, but much worse than that, I would carry these behaviors into every future relationship. I would spend my life ruled by uncontrollable sorrow and rage. I would waste my one wild and precious life.

  Rewiring My Brain

  What ensued in the next five years was a journey toward healing that continues into the present. It involved ripping up the neural networks that had been laid down in my brain in childhood and remained there for over thirty years and replacing them, one by one, with something new. As with any ripping, it was excruciating.

  Years-long engagement with three tools helped me save my own life: Vipassana meditation, which allowed me access into my own body; Co-Dependents Anonymous, which showed me that the behaviors that let me survive childhood were not serving me anymore; and the guidance of a skilled therapist who reparented me into adulthood.

  The other thing that saved me was being in a long-term romantic relationship. I tantrummed for years and when I was done, Whit was still there. With him I had all the emotions I had not been allowed to have as a child, because for the first time, I knew I w
as safe. Some deep part of me recognized that I could trust him, even though I didn’t consciously believe this until years later. He came into our relationship with understanding and compassion already in his bloodline, and I could not have asked for a better partner in the lifework of love.

  Another Explanation

  My therapist and I had worked together for years before he said, “Your mother could be a borderline,” and a door swung open. What if her “moods” were not just marital problems but a diagnosable personality disorder, something that could be qualified and discussed? I know I can’t diagnose my mother. I know it’s extremely complicated to reach a diagnosis even when one works closely with a therapist. But what I can say is that when I read about this condition, for the first time in my life, the disparate pieces of my childhood fell into place. For the first time I felt both hope for myself and compassion for my mother.

  The website borderlinepersonalitytreatment.com lists the following as baseline symptoms of borderline personality disorder (a condition contracted in childhood by abandonment, abuse, or death): neglect, overcontrol, rage, criticism, blame, enmeshment, parental alienation.

  Borderline Personality Disorder

  Learning about BPD was a revelation. The most insightful book for me was Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship by Christine Ann Lawson. On every page I found my family. The book described my mother’s often uncanny behavior with an almost impossible precision. It explained how we worked together as a family to manage, excuse, and ignore what was happening inside our house. It explained how my father enabled. It explained how my sister and I were respectively cast as the all-good and all-bad child, both labels coming with dangerous repercussions.