“I know what you’re going to say, but I can’t say it for you”
Story by: Riley Pickett
There’s no one who knows me quite as well as my mother does. Once I bumped my right knee hard into the edge of a wooden table while we were on the phone, and in that moment, she swore she felt an ache in her own right knee.
As I enter my 27th year and she faces her 60th, we are undeniably best friends. It hasn’t always been this way—I call to mind, hazily, one late night after my senior prom wherein I came home wasted and dead-set on driving to a beach on the coast of Texas not far from where we lived in Houston. Understandably, but not to me at the time, my mom would not hear of me getting into a car with other drunk teenagers and driving to a rocky beach. I’m sure she had visions of car crashes and heads hitting against rocks as waves thrashed against lifeless bodies. But the only thing I remember coming from my mouth (loudly) that night was, “I hate you,” and the sound of slamming doors.
She has given me life and saved my life more times than I could ever know.
And this has involved bodies: in particular, my body.
My knee knocking against wood. My voice straining against vocal chords, screaming. The vibrations of the slamming door, felt.
And her body. The woman who gave me life, whose body I came from. The woman who bathed me. Who carried me, feed me, rubbed my back, and kissed my head.
How could I ever think this woman would reject me,
would stop seeing me as anything other than her daughter,
a beloved and treasured piece of her very self?
Perhaps because of the stories I’ve heard, from strangers and from close friends, of mothers who have severed the cord between their precious child because of who they are. Queer and trans people who have lost mother and brother and father and sister because they could not accept that their bodies love who they love.
Or perhaps it is because I long to be understood. And when I speak, I’m at risk of being misunderstood. And I have for so long relied on the validation and opinions of other people to make me feel okay about who I am.
That December afternoon in 2016 when I asked my mom to go on a walk with me because I had something to tell her, I knew that my silence was killing me in a sense far more destructive than any physical death. Physical death only kills the body, but this was killing my spirit. In the words of Audre Lorde, my silence was not protecting me, and it never would: death would surely come whether I spoke my truth or not.
I was bringing only parts of myself to my mother, and the lack of closeness I felt left me starving for authentic connection. So, with shaking hands and trembling voice, I asked her to walk.
The ask itself was an act of courage.
I remembered a time when I couldn’t ask. It was middle school. A boy, who I will not name but whose name I remember clear as day, had made a comment about my dark, hairy legs in art class, wondering why I didn’t shave like the other girls. I was humiliated and ashamed, of course, and I went home with a newfound desire to shave away this hair that was apparently a barrier to “real” womanhood. This very shame may have been at the heart of why, instead of speaking the question out loud, I wrote my mom a note, asking her if I could shave my legs. In an act of grace, she wrote back. She told me yes and I shaved my legs in her bathroom as she talked to me from the other side of the door. I spent the day under the purple silk blanket in our living room, reveling in the feeling of smoothness against my legs.
I wonder if I was so afraid to speak that day in December because of other lies I had been told about what womanhood looked like. Loving another woman in the way I did was a source of shame; it made me “less than” a real woman. Perhaps the fear of speaking came not from a fear of rejection or misunderstanding, but from my own internalized homophobia transmitted to me from culture and even from the well-meaning people I loved and who loved me.
So, the asking, the speaking out loud that day, was an act of courage. I spoke in the presence of fear. That speaking was also, even if I was unconscious of this at the time, an act of resistance to oppressive norms of gender and sexuality. It was a way to dissipate shame. To disarm it. To reach out across difference toward my mother, with the hope that I would be met with radical acceptance and love.
“I know what you’re going to say, but I can’t say it for you,” is what she said, over and over, as we walked alongside each other.
The woman who knew me so well, who ached when I ached, intuitively knew the truth of who I was. I thought I wanted her to say it for me—to take the easy way out and not have to say it, to not have to face her reaction to me.
But I realize now she gave me a gift that day. She did not rob me of the opportunity to speak and therefore diffuse shame and reclaim power. She gave me the gift of speaking, even in the midst of fear. And, like Lorde, I believe that “speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.” In the speaking that day, I reached across difference and my mom reached back. Our difference was not something to be ashamed of or afraid of, but rather something to be celebrated: heartily, and with our whole bodies.