The walls of silence

How a car accident, an email, and time chipped away at the walls between us. An essay on being mothered and being a mother.

I don’t know how we ended up there near the edge of that cliff by those thicket of bushes. Those four seconds were a lifetime and played out like a director’s take on a car crash, painfully slow and deliberate, complete with a soundtrack of Chopin on piano that happened to be playing on the radio at that moment.

But how did we end up here, 55 feet from the road? After taking in a long breath, we looked around, the Chopin étude still on the radio, the only sound cutting through the quiet except for our breathing. We found no evidence of skid marks on the pavement or tire treads on grass. We weren't sure how we traversed that expanse of space and ended up here. Neither my mom nor I could remember.

Looking back, it’s interesting how this car accident in the summer of 1999 opened up our relationship. It’s a paradox how you can be so close to someone yet still have a wall between you that’s painfully palpable. “I don’t know who you are anymore,” she would say to me during my college years. I didn’t know who I was anymore either, but during that time I was not the good and dutiful daughter she was accustomed to.

In 1996 I moved back home to my parent’s house after essentially running away from my life in New York at age 21. I needed space from everyone and everything, yet when I returned five years later I felt no closer to her than when I was living 3,000 miles away.