I don’t remember the exact day, or week, or month, which held my last conversation with my mother. It’s fuzzy. I know it was sometime in 2018, because it was some months after my wedding which was in fall 2017. I think it was in summertime, because my husband and I volunteer as coaches in a baseball league for children and adults with disabilities, and I remember needing to contact my friends, the league directors, one afternoon to let them know we would have to miss an evening’s game because my mother was in the hospital. The odd thing was that she was in the hospital local to us, rather than where she actually lived…I don’t remember now why that choice was made, but I’m certain it was no coincidence.

I know that visit to her in the hospital was the last time I saw her in person; she made plenty of subtle comments about how it was my fault she was there, because of the stress of our strained relationship. She talked a mile a minute, as if she could hold me there as long as there were still words coming out of her mouth. I remember she had asked for a hug and I’d refused; I was somehow afraid that if I got too close to her, she would get her hooks back in me irretrievably. I think the last time we spoke at all was sometime around then as well. But it’s fuzzy. I’m not sure.

What’s not fuzzy at all is the moment I realized I had hit my breaking point with her, and it actually came months before that summertime hospital visit.

In late February 2018, my husband was away on a routine work trip, and I was at home by myself. I was making marinara sauce, one of my great passions; I’m a big foodie and love to cook and discuss food and recipes, all that jazz. It’s a wonderful shared interest between my husband and I, and cooking is very therapeutic for me, especially sauce making. Anyway, I was slicing up an onion with one of the chef’s knives from the brand new set we had gotten as a wedding gift a few months prior. Well, it turns out, brand new knives are real sharp! Who knew?! I had cleanly sliced off the top of my right thumb, and at first hadn’t even noticed, that’s how sharp the blade was. Finally I saw blood and realized what had happened. Rinsing it under running water was very painful so I quickly wrapped paper towel around my thumb, which it promptly bled through. I noticed the detached end of my thumb on the cutting board when I went to clean up the mess, and realized there would be no point in saving it (not like a more substantial length of severed appendage where one maybe puts it on ice and brings it with them to the hospital, or something?), so it went into the garbage with the contaminated onions.

After three rounds of bleeding through paper towels while doing my best to clean everything up in the kitchen, I realized I was going to need some medical attention, so I wrapped it once more and drove myself one-handed to the urgent care center. They cauterized it, wrapped it, gave me a tetanus shot and some antibiotics, and I then went home and spent an agonizing sleepless night crying out in pain because they’d wrapped it far too tightly. The next morning at like 7:00AM I called my primary care physician who had me come in right away, and they rebandaged it so it felt less like a miniature tourniquet. I healed eventually, and there’s a scar, and you can see the difference between my two thumbs if I hold them up against each other. My husband refused to let me chop and slice things when cooking for awhile after that, but I seem to have regained his trust at this point. We laugh about it now. Not my worst bodily injury, but certainly a noteworthy one! It’s a fun story to share at parties and to regale with my students sometimes.

Why do I consider this incident, of all things, the breaking point of my relationship with my mother?

I never told her about it.

Think about it – you injure yourself severely. What’s the first thing you think to do, either at that moment, or afterward once you know everything is going to be okay? You call your loved ones, right? It’s the kind of noteworthy event you tell the people closest to you about. “Oh my G-d, Ma, I had an accident with a knife slicing some onions, can you come meet me at urgent care?” Or, after the fact, “Hey Ma, guess what, I chopped off my thumb yesterday!” I mean, I called my husband of course, though he was of no help while across the country for another few days; I think I had also called my mother-in-law, just so that someone more near to me was aware of things.

And I thought about it. Often. I thought about calling my mother, to tell her.

But I never did. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I used to talk to her every day, usually more than once a day, about the most inane things. This was anything but inane, and I never called her to let her know about it. To this day she still doesn’t know.

It’s small, in the grand scheme of things. There are more significant pieces of my life I never called her about either, like getting pregnant in 2018 and having my daughter in 2019, and having that scary miscarriage in 2021. But I consider the “thumb incident” the breaking point, because it was the first time ever that I recognized within myself a marked reticence in reaching out to her. It was then that I’d realized that things had undeniably changed. It took some time to decide that this change was irreparable, irreversible; but, this was when I first accepted it at all.

There’s often a misconception that when someone reaches a “breaking point”, it’s some sort of major hubbub or debacle. That a relationship that hits a breaking point ends with fanfare and gunfire. That isn’t necessarily the case. Sometimes a breaking point comes with the slamming of a door; at other times, it comes to a gentle close with the soft snick of the lock turning into place. Some relationships go out with a bang; others go with a whimper.

My entire life had always been so very loud, that I think the quiet, internal recognition of this breaking point had taken me more by surprise than a big blowout argument ever would have.

You know, this might surprise some people who know me personally, but in spite of my vocality, I actually do vastly prefer the quiet.