'What My Mother and I Don't Talk About'

Mothers are a difficult topic to talk about. Even to think about it is frightening. More than the relationship with our fathers mothers - or their absence - are setting up impossible to break neural networks. Their love, neglect, indifference, hate and aggressivity is what further define our relationships, life disfunctionalities or success. We want to be like our mothers, or someone else completely. 

What My Mother and I Don't Talk About. Fifteen Writers Break the Silence is a terrible testimony of this complex reality we set up - rarelly consciously - with our mothers. The fifteen essays collected in the book expose different aspects of this relationship. Each story is different as each and every relationship with a mother differs, with its goods and bads. The essays differ also in intensity and in the ways in which the writers are reevaluating this relationship. From curiosity to complete rejection and pity, mothers are not easy to talk about, to understand and describe in just a few words.

Each essays open wounds or questions, and one of the heaviest emotionally is the opening one by Michele Filgate, about how her mother ignored the repeated abuse of her step-father. I've heard about similar situations more than once and I am still puzzled: how it is possible to sink into such a deep denial that you ignore the terrible things done to your own child? The answer to this question always leaves me speechless in sadness. 

Between mothers and children there are so many open questions, silences and regrets. But after going through the essays I figured out that there are so many ways left to see, understand and translate motherhood. So many questions to ask, answers to get and forgiveness to allow. Unless by the time you are reaching such a level of self-reflection, your mother is long gone. 

Rating: 4 stars