The Silence Between My Mother’s Words

The Silence Between My Mother’s Words

My mother speaks in English like she’s walking on unfamiliar ground. Her words are careful, placed deliberately, like stones in a stream. In between them, there are silences—pregnant, loaded, shaped like the things she wants to say but doesn’t have the vocabulary for.

When I was younger, I mistook those pauses for uncertainty. Now I realize they are grief.

She was born in a village where the trees knew her name. Where the mountains told time by the curve of the sun, and women spoke in a rhythm I only ever heard in lullabies. She never meant to leave that village. It left her. Piece by piece. War. Then marriage. Then migration.

I was born in a concrete apartment in a cold country with white winters and hard consonants. My tongue learned English in school, in cartoons, in playground quarrels. Her tongue carried history. Mine carried assimilation.

We were always close but never quite the same shape.

I remember standing in the grocery aisle, maybe nine or ten, translating cereal brands for her.

“This one is chocolate,” I’d say.

She’d nod but her eyes would scan the shelf like she was looking for something else. Something we didn’t have names for here.

When I asked for playdates or tried to explain why we weren’t like the other families, she’d pause. The silence would stretch long before she said, “We are not them, beta.”

Not angry. Not ashamed. Just a gentle closing of the door.

As a teenager, I resented her for it. For not knowing how to say the right thing at parent-teacher meetings. For mispronouncing my friends’ names. For the quiet that followed whenever I cried.

“You never talk to me,” I’d snap.

“I don’t have the words,” she whispered once. “Not in your language.”

That stuck with me.

What did it mean to be a woman made of two languages, standing between a mother and a world she could no longer explain?

There’s a memory I come back to often:

One summer evening, she’s folding laundry on the bed, humming a song I don’t recognize.

I ask her what it means.

She hesitates.

“It’s an old song. From home.”

“Sing it to me,” I say.

She does.

It’s a story about a girl and a mango tree, about waiting, about the moon.

I don’t understand every word, but I feel it. Like the way she tucks the sheet tight under the mattress. Like how she always leaves a light on when I come home late. Like how she never says “I love you,” but always asks if I’ve eaten.

That’s when I started listening to her silences.

They were never empty.

They carried the weight of missing siblings, of traditions folded and packed away like wedding saris in plastic boxes.

They spoke of the bitterness of being seen as “foreign,” and the guilt of not returning home for funerals.

They sang songs of joy too—of watching me graduate, of laughing over Bollywood melodramas, of mangoes ripening on a windowsill.

Now, when we sit in the kitchen and sip chai, I don’t rush her words.

Sometimes we don’t speak at all.

Sometimes we just let the silence settle like sugar at the bottom of the cup.

And in those silences, I’ve learned to hear everything she’s never said.

Her love is not in what she says. It’s in the spaces between.

It’s in the way she braids my hair when I’m too tired to do it myself.

It’s in the plastic containers of rice and lentils she packs for me when I leave.

It’s in the prayers she whispers behind closed doors, in a language older than both of us.

Now, I’m learning her first tongue—slowly, like peeling fruit.

And every word feels like a home I didn’t know I’d lost.

One day, I will speak it fluently.

One day, I will tell her:

I finally understand.

Not just what you said. But what you meant.