The Inheritance of Silence

A Personal Essay

The Inheritance of Silence
A Personal Essay
By Mira Wolfe

My mother was born in 1939, the oldest of three girls. From the way she talked about her parents, she was clearly a daddy’s girl. She often said she hated her mother.

She left school in the fifth grade to care for the family after her father lost his leg to diabetes. Her mother, overwhelmed and anxious, drank. My only memories of my grandmother are of a frightened little woman clutching her oxygen tank — birdlike, fragile. My mother was the same size: barely five feet, maybe ninety pounds soaking wet.

I understand my mother’s resentment. She lost her childhood to responsibility. I also understand my grandmother’s fear — anxiety runs through our family like a thread we can’t untangle.

At sixteen, my mother escaped the only way she knew how: she got married. My grandfather signed the papers. Sometimes I wonder if anyone did the same for my grandmother — signed her into a life she wasn’t ready for.

Growing up, I had four brothers and one sister, although the total count eventually grew to six brothers and two sisters. I thought we were a typical family until I started telling stories about my childhood and saw the looks on my friends’ faces.

My parents were emotionally immature and probably shouldn’t have had children. We were disciplined but not loved. My mother took pride in our silence when guests came. She thought quiet meant respect; really, it was fear.

I never saw my grandparents as villains. Maybe they were just as harsh to her as she was to us. My father’s own dad disappeared during the Depression, so I suppose emotional absence ran on both sides.

My mother did what mothers of her generation did — cooked, cleaned, stretched every dollar. We didn’t realize how poor we were until we were grown. For that, she deserves credit. But love was not part of her vocabulary. We grew up in survival mode.

As adults, my siblings and I scattered across the country. I send Christmas cards sometimes. My sister and I used to be close — she was the second child bride — but distance and time finished what our upbringing had already begun.

I also married young, at nineteen. Like everyone else, I just wanted to get away. The marriage lasted a year, and somehow, I ended up right back with my mother. We lived together, in one form or another, until she died last year.

She was a difficult woman — manipulative, sharp-tongued, and skilled at making me doubt myself. But she was also steady in her own way. When no one else was there, she was. By the time she passed, only my sister and I still spoke to her. I don’t blame the others. I understand.

She did the best she could with what she had — a fifth-grade education, constant anxiety, and a lifetime of unspoken fear. She fixed what she thought mattered and left the rest undone.

Sometimes I see families who laugh easily, who hug without hesitation, and I wonder what that must feel like. I try to reach out to mine now and then, but the connection never quite forms. We weren’t raised to love each other; we were raised to survive each other.

Every family leaves something unsaid. This is me learning to speak.

Until next time, dip from your inkwell often,
Mira Wolfe Writes…