What My Mother and I Don't Talk About

by Michele Filgate

  “Did I see her as selling out?” he says. “Maybe a little bit.”

  He looked at her new husband, my father, and thought, He’s a Stanford professor, he’s got two PhDs, he’s good-looking. My dad only has one PhD, but it makes sense that Peter exaggerated his status in memory. It felt to Peter as if my mom was saying, See how much better I’m doing now; I’ve moved way up the ladder from you. Peter found himself thinking, What do I have that he doesn’t have? The answer was conviction: fidelity to the set of values he and my mom had shared.

  * * *

  Although Peter and my mom have both stayed committed to the ideals that brought them together in the first place, Peter’s commitment has meant working outside institutions, or against them, while my mother has worked within them: the academy, the nonprofit, the church. Peter has spent the past fifty years as a nonviolent resister and a tax protestor, playing guitar in a political satire band called Dr. Atomic’s Medicine Show. His son, Shanti—the baby my mother saw on the mattress, years ago, who was raised on the commune—has become a corporate executive.

  Over those same fifty years, my mother not only married an economics professor but became a professor herself, of public health, and raised three kids while doing PhD fieldwork on infant malnutrition in rural Brazil, bringing two young sons to rural villages where she was weighing malnourished babies on hammock scales, and spending decades researching maternal health in West Africa. Her version of retirement involved becoming an Episcopal deacon and running after-school nutrition programs for kids from low-income communities through the church.

  Both of their lives can make you feel exhausted, and more than a little bit guilty, like, What have I done to save the world today? They’ve both gotten arrested plenty of times, protesting wars and wage gaps and nuclear force, but my mother has done it in clerical robes, usually returning from jail to find a text message from her daughter waiting on her cell phone.

  After fifty years, their intimacy holds so much friction and rupture and youth. Intimacy after a divorce might not come cheaply, but it runs deep. It runs deeper for its price. It’s about knowing who someone was and how they changed—and carrying all those past versions of them inside. More than once, Peter tells me, “Despite all my other relationships, I have never stopped loving your mother.”

  * * *

  In Portland, after our visit to the house on Knapp Street, we head to a protest at the Army Corps of Engineers. Peter is carrying two flags: a peace flag and an Earth flag. It’s February, at the tail end of the Standing Rock protest against an oil pipeline proposed to run under the Missouri River, near Native lands. At this point, most of the water protectors have already left, and the rest will be cleared later that month. The Army Corps of Engineers has granted permission for the pipe to get laid. That’s what we are protesting.

  Turns out that the offices of the Army Corps of Engineers are located in a very staid office building behind a shopping mall, across from a small homeless encampment. But we don’t see a protest anywhere: not in the parking lot outside the office building, not in the lobby itself. We just see a single security guard behind a desk. He asks us politely, “Can I help you?”

  I am embarrassed. I feel absurd. But Peter asks the security guard where we can find the Army Corps of Engineers. He directs us to the fourth floor.

  Part of me is expecting to find a very small protest on the fourth floor, but there is no very small protest on the fourth floor—or else, we are the very small protest on the fourth floor. There’s just a friendly receptionist behind a desk. When the other elevator opens, we see the security guard from the lobby.

  “I decided I’d follow you up,” he says. “You all looked confused.”

  “We are confused,” Peter tells him. “We also have a message for the Army Corps of Engineers.”

  On my own, I’d already be out the door—probably partially relieved that the protest wasn’t happening, that we could spend the next few hours talking instead; probably suggesting we all get coffee. But Peter tells the receptionist, “We’d like to speak to someone about what’s happening at Standing Rock.”

  She asks us to wait and then disappears into a warren of cubicles. A few moments later, to my great surprise, a colonel in full fatigues comes out to the reception area and invites us back. He is calling our bluff. But that’s the thing: Peter isn’t bluffing. This is him in action—no awkwardness, all persistence.

  The colonel ends up taking us to a glass-walled conference room, where he sits at the head of a long oval table. Peter sits next to him, propping his peace flag and his Earth flag on the leather swivel seat beside him as if they are obedient children. Later, the internet will tell me that this colonel spent time in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Close up, his fatigues are impressive, their canvas creases crisp and imposing.

  We are joined by a much younger man wearing a sage-green fleece vest. “This is Jason,” says the colonel. “He’s one of our lawyers.” Jason gives us a sheepish smile.

  Peter launches into an articulate, passionate, and surprisingly specific account of what concerns him about the pipeline being laid near the Standing Rock reservation. When Jason launches into a technical reply, the colonel cuts him off. “Too many acronyms!” he says. “Sounds like alphabet soup.”

  Then the colonel takes a piece of blank paper and starts drawing a map: the Missouri River, the “existing easement,” the Standing Rock tribal lands. It’s not like the Army Corps of Engineers is building the pipeline, he reminds us. They are just granting permission. My mom brings up an order issued by Obama that got overturned. Peter backs her up; he seems to know every court order that has ever been at play. I stay silent. I’m impressed by Peter and my mother’s knowledge, and also relieved by it. I’d expected a regular protest—where I could chant in relative ignorance, self-satisfied and anonymous—but this is something else: a kind of pop quiz. What do I actually know about Standing Rock? Not enough to talk to a colonel for an hour.

  As the conversation continues, it’s clear that the lawyer and the colonel are coming from different places: while the colonel is a company man, toeing the line completely, Jason comes across as deeply troubled. He went to law school to study tribal law. Maybe he started working here so that he could reform the system from the inside out. Or at least, that’s the story I’ve written for him in my head. Now he’s sitting in a corporate office in a fleece vest defending a pipeline through tribal lands. He seems quietly heartbroken. The colonel’s stance is more like, What do you want me to do about it? He seems exasperated by our constant questions about “their land.” At one point, he raises his voice: “We’re all on their land, right here! Everything is their land!”

  At this, Peter and I share a knowing glance: Exactly.

  The colonel tells us that the Army Corps has gone “above and beyond” consulting with the tribe. They’ve done their due diligence. This is when I finally work up the nerve to say something. “Well, the tribe seems to disagree.”

  Peter chimes in: “Along with three hundred other tribes!”

  Jason keeps bringing us back to the Sioux Treaty of 1868 and the precedent it set. “You might have whatever feelings you have about the Treaty of 1868,” he says, “and I might have whatever feelings I have about the Treaty of 1868—”

  I cut him off: “What feelings do you have about the Treaty of 1868?”

  He says, “It was a tragedy.”

  A few beats of silence pass. We all hold that truth. I keep waiting for Jason and the colonel to check their watches. The colonel repeats that they have adhered to every law. “I don’t think you guys are breaking any laws,” I say. “I think the laws are broken.”

  It sounds smug and self-righteous the moment I say it, as if I’m plagiarizing from a documentary about sixties activism, but when Peter says, “Yes!” I flush with pride. I’m pleased that I’ve impressed him, the radical activist, and also aware that I’m enacting and replicating my mother’s own desires from years ago: to be good enough for him.<
br />
  * * *

  All told, we meet with Jason and the colonel for almost an hour and a half in their glass-walled conference room on “their land.” I spend much of the time confused about why we haven’t yet been politely escorted to the door. Is this a PR thing? A Portland thing? Don’t they have work to do?

  Just before we leave, Peter calls upon both men to look deep into themselves and think about what they believe is right. Maybe it’s cheesy, but a voice in me is also saying, Amen!

  As we walk out of the office, I can hear my mother inviting Jason to my reading that evening. Mothers will still be mothers, even in the offices of the Army Corps of Engineers.

  By the time we reach the parking lot, I’m already fantasizing about how this conversation might change the entire course of Jason’s career, and once we get to the car, my mother confesses that she has been having exactly the same daydream: five years from now, he will look back on today as the day that changed his life. My ego and my mother’s ego are built in similar ways. Once again, I search for the edges between us, try to remind myself they are there. But there is a kind of amniotic pleasure in having trouble locating these edges, in feeling this symmetry instead, this union. How had Peter put it? So much together, but not merging. Sometimes it feels good to merge, to say—irrationally, feverishly, stubbornly—I am my mother, and she is me.

  Jason and the colonel must have assumed we were a family: two tall ex-hippies in their early seventies and their tall daughter. And today, in a strange way, we are: the manifestation of an alternate reality, the road not traveled, in which Peter and my mom had a child together, and took her with them—three decades later—to keep protesting the world.

  * * *

  Whenever I locate differences between me and my mom, I mainly construct them as self-punishing binaries: She studied malnourished children. I had an eating disorder. She left her marriage with stoic fortitude. My ex-boyfriend once called me a wound dweller. While I’m preoccupied by my own pain, she is preoccupied by the pain of others. Or maybe she isn’t preoccupied by pain at all, but by strategies of subsistence and survival.

  For years, though I never articulated it explicitly to myself, I suspected that my only choices were to identify with my mom completely or else to somehow fail her. When I read The Parting of the Ways, I found myself either projecting onto her character or else shaming myself with the gaps between us: her stoicism, my woundedness; her outwardness, my self-concern. She was unhappy in her relationship because she wanted to show up for her Peace Corps assignment. I was unhappy in my last relationship because I wanted more frequent text messages. I connected more to Peter’s “wriggling eel of pain” than I did to her firm-set mouth.

  It’s also true, however, that I’ve been the one to leave almost every relationship I’ve ever been in—and often, not always, because I felt a certain kind of claustrophobia, which isn’t to pathologize my past so much as to suggest that perhaps I share my mom’s attachment to distances and boundaries more than I’ve recognized, that her hunger for independence isn’t so alien to me.

  When I told Peter this essay would be about his evolving relationship to my mother, it was the truth. But it wasn’t all of the truth. Because the essay is also about my evolving relationship with my mother, how some part of me wanted to humanize her myth, and how I found, in Peter’s portrait of her, another gaze saturated by worship—but also the puncturing of that worship with the admission of her actual, textured self.

  I didn’t ask Peter’s novel to disrupt the stories I told myself about my mom and me, but it did. It allowed me to see that both she and I have always been more complicated than the binaries I’ve constructed for us to inhabit, in which we are either identical or opposite. 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.

  * * *

  That night in Portland, in the upstairs chapel on the Reed campus where my mom and Peter had once taken their freshman humanities lecture, I read from an essay about the massive women’s march that had happened after Trump’s inauguration. It was an essay about protest and why it still mattered, even—or especially—as the president seemed to threaten every single value my mom and Peter had spent the past five decades fighting for.

  Jason the lawyer had not come to my reading, but my mom and Peter sat side by side in pews near the front—just as they’d sat in those pews years before. It felt like I was speaking to the people they’d once been, when they were protesting at the courthouse downtown and that woman told my mother she hoped her children grew up to hate her, and then when Peter visited my mother in Palo Alto years later, and she worried that she’d disappointed him. That reading was a way of telling her, You did not disappoint anyone. It was a way of saying, Your children will grow up to love you. It was as if I was trying to project my admiration back through time to reassure the woman my mom had been, that woman who felt only that she had somehow failed the man who loved her first—that woman who did not know, could not have known, the road ahead.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to all fourteen writers featured in this book for sharing such personal and heartfelt stories from their own lives.

  An anthology is a collaborative project, and I couldn’t have edited this book without the guidance of my whip-smart editor, Karyn Marcus, and my badass agent, Melissa Flashman. Thank you to Taylor Larsen for “locking” me in her parent’s dining room so I could finally finish the essay that inspired this book, and to Lauren LeBlanc for her insightful feedback and edits. Thanks to Sari Botton for believing in me and publishing my essay on Longreads.

  Thanks to the entire team at Simon & Schuster, including Molly Gregory, Kayley Hoffman, Madeline Schmitz, Elise Ringo, and Max Meltzer.

  I would be remiss if I didn’t thank everyone who helped me shape my essay or encouraged me along the way, including Kelly McMasters, Margot Kahn, Tobias Carroll, Jo Ann Beard and Team Jo Ann Beard at the Tin House Summer Workshop, Jennifer Pastiloff, Lidia Yuknavitch, Caroline Leavitt, Porochista Khakpour, Tom Holbrook, Julia Fierro, Julie Buntin, Brian Chait, and Bethanne Patrick.

  Thank you to other anthology editors for their advice: Jennifer Baker, Brian Gresko, Sari Botton, and Lilly Dancyger.

  Thank you to my family, including my siblings: Jennifer, Colin, and Emma. Thank you to Michael Filgate and Nancy. Thank you to Leesa.

  This book is dedicated to my grandmothers. Nana and Mimo are the strongest women I know.

  Thank you to Melissa Wacks for her astute guidance throughout the entire process of working on this book.

  And last but certainly not least: Thank you to Sean Fitzroy for making me laugh and being such a wonderful human being. I love you.

  About the Authors

  André Aciman is a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of Out of Egypt: A Memoir, False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, and four novels: Call Me by Your Name, Eight White Nights, Harvard Square, and Enigma Variations. He is currently working on a novel and a collection of essays. His novel Call Me by Your Name was released as a film and was awarded an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2018.

  Julianna Baggott is the author of more than twenty novels, published under her own name as well as pen names. Her recent novels Pure (an ALA Alex Award winner) and Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She’s published four collections of poetry and her essays have appeared in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the New York Times Modern Love column, and on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, All Things Considered, and Here and Now. She teaches screenwriting at Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts and currently lives in Delaware.

  Sari Botton is a writer living in Kingston, New York. She is the essays editor for Longreads and editor of the award-winning anthology Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York and its New York Times bestselling follow-
up, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York She is also the operator of the Kingston Writers’ Studio.

  Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, an essay collection. He is the winner of a Whiting Award and fellowships from the NEA and the MCCA, and his essays and stories have appeared recently in the New York Times Magazine, The Yale Review, T magazine, and Tin House He teaches creative writing at Dartmouth College.

  Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart and the essay collection Abandon Me, which was a Lambda Literary Award finalist, a Publishing Triangle Award finalist, an Indie Next Pick, and widely named a Best Book of 2017. Febos is the inaugural winner of the Jeanne Córdova Award for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction from Lambda Literary and the recipient of the 2017 Sarah Verdone Writing Award from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the BAU Institute, and Ragdale. Her essays have recently appeared in Tin House, Granta, The Believer, and the New York Times She lives in Brooklyn.

  Michele Filgate’s work has appeared on Longreads, in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, Gulf Coast, O, The Oprah Magazine, BuzzFeed, Refinery29, and many other publications. Currently she is an MFA student at NYU, where she is the recipient of the Stein Fellowship. She’s a contributing editor at Literary Hub and teaches at the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop and Catapult. What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About is her first book.