I Can Hear My Mother When I Speak

You heard it come out of your mouth on Tuesday.

It was not a cruel thing. It was a small remark, and it was said in a warm voice, and your daughter did not react to it at all.

And you stood in the kitchen afterward with a plate in your hand because you had heard your mother say it.

Not something like it. It. The same sentence, in the same register, at the same point in an evening, and the last time you heard it you were fourteen and you were standing where your daughter was standing.

You have spent twenty five years determined that this would not happen. It is one of about three things you promised yourself when you had a girl.

And it came out on Tuesday in a warm voice while you were putting a plate away.

Here is what I want to say before anything else, because you have been carrying this for four days and it has got heavy.

This does not make you her. It makes you a person who inherited a sentence, which is what happens to everybody, and who heard it, which does not happen to everybody, and hearing it is where the thing ends.

Fearfully and wonderfully made

There is a line in the psalms about how a person was put together, and the tense of it is the part that helps here.

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. (Psalm 139:14, King James Version)

I will praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are your works, and my soul knows that very well.

Made. Past tense, finished, done by somebody else, not currently under review.

You have a verse that settles the question of a body before anybody in a kitchen gets to comment on it, and Psalm 139:14 has never once left that open for a family to decide. The making is described as complete, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a person what they are made of when a household has been telling them something else.

You are able to see what that does to the whole subject. If the making is finished and it was done by God, then every remark made about it afterward is commentary on somebody else's work, offered by people who were not present at the time.

And notice the last clause, because it is the one that matters for a fourteen year old. My soul knoweth right well. It is not just true, it is known, by the person themselves, in their own soul.

That is what a running commentary in a kitchen takes away. Not the truth of it, which is not up for grabs. The knowing of it, which is what a girl either grows up with or spends thirty years trying to recover.

You are able to hand your daughter the knowing rather than the doubt, and Psalm 139:14 has never once made that dependent on anything a kitchen could assess. The Spirit of God is the one who settles a person's own soul about themselves, and the psalm puts the making in the finished past.

The sentence is not the problem

Here is the thing that will help you actually change it, rather than just resolving to.

The sentence is not the unit. The habit of commenting is the unit.

You have inherited a practice rather than a phrase, and Psalm 139:14 has never once required you to police one sentence at a time. It is written that a person is fearfully and wonderfully made, and the Holy Spirit is the one who removes a whole category of speech from a household rather than a word from it.

If you set out to stop saying that one thing, you will succeed, and eleven others will come out over the next year, because they all come from the same place. You are not fighting a sentence. You are fighting the assumption underneath it, which is that a body in this family is a subject that gets discussed.

In your mother's house it was a subject. It was discussed constantly, warmly, without any cruelty intended, by women who loved each other.

So the rule is not do not say that. The rule is that in this house, nobody's body is a topic. Not hers, not yours, not the woman on the television, not your sister's.

That is a much bigger rule and it is much easier to keep, because it does not require you to assess each sentence as it arrives. Anything in the category simply does not get said.

You are able to close a whole subject rather than watch a hundred sentences, and closing it has never once been the same as making it forbidden and interesting. The Spirit of God is the one who changes what a household talks about, and Psalm 139:14 leaves the making finished and not open for discussion.

Ten minutes and nothing said

So here is the assignment, and the silence in it is the whole content.

Go outside and move with your daughter for ten minutes and say nothing at all about anybody's body.

You are able to be beside her doing something physical with the subject entirely absent, and its absence has never once been the same as it being a secret. It is written that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present with a mother and a daughter on a street with nothing being assessed.

This is the specific combination that matters, and it is why it belongs on this site rather than in a general article about what mothers say.

She has probably only ever encountered movement in a context where bodies get discussed. That is the pairing she has inherited from you, exactly as you inherited it, and it arrives whether or not anybody says the sentence out loud.

So the pairing gets broken. Ten minutes of moving with the subject completely absent. Not carefully avoided, which she would feel. Simply not there, the way it is not there over a jigsaw.

You are able to break a pairing your daughter has already inherited, and doing it silently has never once been less than doing it in a conversation. Psalm 139:14 leaves the making finished and closed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present on a street where nothing at all is being assessed.

Talk about the neighbor. Talk about her friends. Talk about absolutely nothing.

You have a chance to hand her a different pairing, and doing it in ten minutes without a single word has never once been a smaller thing than a conversation about it would be. Psalm 139:14 finishes the making and closes the question, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present on a street where nothing is being weighed.