The Conversations I Never Had with My Mother

There are a lot of things I did not discuss with my mother while she was alive. I didn’t ask, for example, what she was like as a person before she became my mother. I didn’t press her to tell me, to truly open up, about her hopes and dreams before I came into existence. I didn’t sit her down with any coffee and cake, to ply her for confessions about her past. I didn’t work hard to get my mother to show me who she really was before her life became about raising me.

Another thing I never discussed with my mother was how much she shaped the person that I am. I never told her, for example, that she is the person who taught me how to tell a story, that I learned by watching her, the way her voice would rise and fall, how she would unspool twists and turns like a master. I never admitted that the way I talk with my hands, the loud sound of my laughter, the way I know how to tell when the pasta dough is just right, is all because of her. Or that I hung on to the faith she so desperately wanted me to have, the same faith she thought she failed to pass on, yet that lives inside me because of her. I resisted telling my mother these things, I suppose, because I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing she’d gotten what she wanted.

I never told my mother what happened to me in graduate school with my professor, either, because I was afraid it would upset her. I never told her how scared I was, how broken and sad. In the short time I was an adult while she was alive, I held her at arm’s length, worried she was too fragile to know the hard things about my life. She was sick for most of those years, so I didn’t have the conversations I needed to have with my mother out of my own belief that it was my turn to be the one to offer her protection.

I think, almost every day, of the things I didn’t tell my mother. The things I do not know about her, that she doesn’t know about me either, because our time for sharing them is gone.

For my scholarly research, I ask people questions for a living. I interview them, draw their ideas and opinions from their hearts and memories. I love being the recipient of the stories that people would never tell anyone else, but they tell me precisely because they will never speak to me again. I am only the researcher, the person who will allow their identities to remain anonymous when I write about them.

I suppose this is the issue, right? With our mothers?

They will never be anonymous, they will always be intimately tied to our lives, the stakes so unbelievably high that we fail to ask about the things we wish to know while we can still know them. Ask any husband or wife how hard this is. To be vulnerable in the face of a spouse. To share your secrets with that person. To ask the things that spark your curiosity but are afraid to talk about.

I wish I could make a study of my mother. I wish I could interview her like one of my research subjects. Sit her down across from me and pull the secrets from her memory.

This June will mark the seventeenth anniversary of my mother’s death. Seventeen whole years of not speaking to my mother or telling her anything at all. Seventeen whole years of not asking her questions, of not calling her up on the phone to drive her crazy about something or other, seventeen entire years without her pestering me about something else or other either. Seventeen whole years of wishing I could ask my mother advice about my life, my choices, about whether or not I should have a child, about how I might survive a divorce. Seventeen whole years of wanting to hear my mother say to me, that she’d love me no matter what I chose, what befell me, what mistakes I might have made.

The good thing about the faith my mother so determined to pass along to me is that it teaches us to talk to the dead. That we should talk to the dead, in fact. That the dead are all around us, all of the time, in the communion of saints. We can engage in lively, ongoing conversations with the dead among us, ask them for things like help with parking spaces, finding lost engagement rings in the yard, with our workouts, our various trials and tribulations, large and small, great and mundane. We can tell the dead all the things we don’t dare share with the other people around us, the people who are still living. So, my faith—that faith my mother gave to me—encourages me to know that I can just talk to my mother if I want to. Tell her all those things I never did while she was alive. Trust that she is out there listening, waiting for me to speak.