Say What You Mean

Or let your silence speak for you.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

In the town where I grew up, there was a place called the Booth Memorial Home. I didn’t know it was an actual place until I was well into my grade school years; I’d heard adults say She went to Booth, but I knew adults sometimes spoke in riddles. They said things like That place has gone to hell, but they didn’t mean the earth had actually split open and the place in question had descended into Satan’s fiery lair.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when we happened to drive past Booth. What I do remember is seeing several pregnant teenagers having a picnic on the grass out front, which struck me as odd. I’d seen individual pregnant moms, but I’d never seen them gathered in a group. And these were obviously not moms—they were girls. They looked roughly the same age as my older sister.

My mother must must have noticed me looking out the window at that moment. “That’s Booth. That’s where girls go if they get themselves in trouble,” she said.

This was meant to be a cautionary tale, and it contained another one of those adult riddles: in trouble meant pregnant. I didn’t know this yet, of course. I also didn’t know that only girls could get themselves in trouble. Nor did I recognize the absurdity of talking about this as something girls did to themselves.

But I was old enough to know that I lived in the sort of family where asking a lot of questions could also get you in trouble (of an entirely different sort), so I didn’t ask follow-up questions. I’d learned it was best to accept whatever information I was offered and move on.

If I had asked What kind of trouble?, my mom probably would have said I’ll tell you when you’re older. That was another thing that didn’t actually mean what it said.

Many parents of her generation assumed that what a girl didn’t know couldn’t hurt her, though the opposite is actually true, and part of the reason why Booth existed.

I thought about that moment after reading Sallie Reynolds’ heartbreaking essay Where’s Caroline? Her story focuses on a girl who disappeared after giving birth to a baby girl as a teenager, and it made me think about Kris*.

Kris had a very cute boyfriend who was a few years older than we were. Dean* picked her up after her shift at McDonald’s, where we both worked, and swept her away on his motorcycle. Kris had light blue eyes, olive skin, silky ash blonde hair—she was extraordinarily pretty. She was also kind and patient with me as I learned the ropes at McDonald’s, which is not something I can say about my other coworkers.

Beautiful, sweet, a handsome boyfriend with a motorcycle: I desperately wanted to be Kris. Then I learned she was pregnant, had dropped out of high school, and was living at Booth while she finished her GED. (This was also when I learned that a girl who appeared to be blessed in every possible way could still end up going to Booth.)

Some years later—long after I’d finished high school and left that awful job at McDonald’s behind, after I’d gone to college and moved across the country for grad school—I saw an item in the local paper while I was visiting home. I recognized Dean’s unusual last name. The article said he’d been killed in an accident, thrown from his motorcycle, leaving behind a wife and daughter.

I told my mother how I knew who he was. I told her I’d known Kris for a little while.

“That poor girl,” my mother said.

Kris and I were halfway through our twenties by then. She was certainly young to be a wife, a mother, now a widow—but she was definitely not a girl.

I don’t know whether I pointed that out, whether I said She’s a woman, not a girl. A wife and a mother, just like you. Probably not. Probably I knew my mother would roll her eyes and sigh before she said “You know what I mean.”

And I did. So it’s likely I just said nothing. There are times when silence serves our purposes more effectively than words could hope to.

Our inability to say what we mean is another thing I’ve been thinking about lately, especially since reading Jess Wakefield’s The Loneliness Behind ‘You’re So Strong’, which outlines the ways our words can make people feel invisible even when we think we’re offering support. I think this happens mostly because we’re saying things we’ve heard other people say, not taking a moment to think about what we hope to communicate.

For example: You’re doing such a great job of caring for Mike, someone says, and I think You wouldn’t say that if you knew how many times a day I lose my shit. But I don’t say this, of course, because I know what they mean. If I say anything, it’s Thank you.

Another thing I hear fairly often: Mike is so lucky to have you. This one makes me want to scream. Luck is what happens to us by chance, not what happens as the result of our choices. I choose to be here for Mike, every day, for very specific reasons. Luck has nothing to do with it.

Then there’s I can’t imagine . . . No matter what follows, it’s the most isolating comment of all. It suggests that my life story is unfolding in a universe so completely foreign, no one can even picture it.

I don’t respond in a negative way to comments like these because, as my mother would remind me, I know what people mean. And I’m pretty much convinced that very few of us take the time to strive for accuracy when we speak.

It’s not a skill we practice, after all. We love euphemisms, idioms, all sorts of strategic evasions. We say she went to Booth when what we mean is her family abandoned her when she needed their help. Or we say that poor girl when what we mean is It’s tragic that someone so young can know that kind of suffering. Or I can’t imagine, when what we really mean is I refuse to imagine that what is happening to you could also happen to me.

When we don’t know what to say, we’re uncomfortable letting silence speak for us—so we offer words we’ve heard before to fill that space.

But I’m a writer and a professor of English, a person who believes the specific words we choose actually matter. And I believe there is something to be said for letting someone know when it’s hard to come up with the right words. Letting a moment of silence reveal that struggle.

If we took our time, we might come up with something helpful.

Something like That sounds like a hard decision.

Or I really respect the fact that you’re still there for Mike.

Just something simple and true. Something that actually means what it says.

*These names have been changed.