Raised By Silence
October 19, 2025
Raised By Silence
October 19, 2025
Raised By Silence
October 19, 2025
By Maude Harrison-Hudson, M.Div.
By Maude Harrison-Hudson, M.Div.
By Maude Harrison-Hudson, M.Div.
Raised By Silence
Breaking Generational Silence as a Black Mother, Daughter, and Survivor
I am grateful to share a new essay from my heart, “Raised By Silence,” now published in No More Margins Literary Journal. a digital literary journal uplifting the voices of Black women writers. Unlike previous reflections, this one journeys through the unspoken places of my past, where silence was both shield and shackle. Writing it brought tears, release, and deep gratitude for how far grace has carried me.
You can also read the full issue (for free!) starting October 19 at https://nomoremargins.com.
I grew up in a house where silence was a matter of survival. Not the peaceful kind, but the type that hums just under the skin. Tight. Watchful and always ready to snap. When I asked my mother about my father, her face hardened, as if she had swallowed glass. “Don’t ask me about him again,” she said. That was the end of it. He was schizophrenic, institutionalized for most of his life, and in my mother’s eyes, erased. That silence raised me. It taught me to hide my questions, bury my grief, and live around the gaps. Years later, I passed that same silence to my children, protecting them from truths I was too wounded to tell. But silence doesn’t protect. It disconnects. It isolates. And in my family, it nearly destroyed us.
My father’s name was rarely spoken in our home. When it was, it came laced with bitterness or cut short like a bad habit. He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager and spent most of his life in a mental hospital. I didn’t know what schizophrenia was when I was a child. I just knew my mother didn’t want his name in the air.
One day, I asked her why he didn’t come home. Her eyes narrowed, her whole face tightening like a fist. “Don’t ask me about him again,” she turned away. I didn’t. I swallowed my questions along with my tears. Her silence wasn’t gentle—it was absolute, like a door slammed shut.
Later, I would understand: my mother was carrying her silence, inherited from generations before her. As the granddaughter of enslaved people, she’d learned that survival sometimes meant suppressing what hurt. Talking about mental illness, failure, or loss wasn’t safe. It could bring shame, judgment, or worse. So, she didn’t speak. And I learned not to either.
But silence has a cost. It doesn’t just guard pain; it multiplies it. I began to wonder if there was something wrong with me. Did I remind her of him? Was that why her eyes went cold when I asked questions? Without answers, I filled the space with self-blame.
My father’s absence became a kind of haunting. I didn’t know his laugh, his scent, or his story—only that I came from someone no one was allowed to mention. And that absence shaped me. It taught me to hide the parts of myself that felt broken, to put on a strong façade while crumbling quietly inside.
That silence didn’t end with me. I carried it into adulthood, wearing it like armor. And one day, I passed it on.
By the time I had children of my own, I thought I’d left the past behind. But the truth is, silence travels quietly. It doesn’t shout its presence—it settles in your bones and becomes part of how you live, how you mother, how you explain—or don’t explain—the hardest parts of life.
When Kim (my daughter) was born, I was just nineteen and terrified. Felix, her father, was charming but volatile. One minute, he was tender. Next, he was threatening to take her if I gave her up for adoption. My mother, hardened by her history, warned me: “Don’t let that man near your baby. He’s wild enough to do something crazy.” I listened to her. And just like that, the pattern began again.
I didn’t tell Kim about her father, not the good, not the bad. I told myself it was to protect her. But the truth was, I didn’t know how to tell her a story; I hadn’t made peace with myself. How could I explain that I had once loved a man I now feared? That I had let her grow up without knowing half of who she was?
With my son, I did the same. His father—my first husband—died after years of addiction and chaos. I erased him, too. Not because I didn’t care, but because I didn’t have the words, or the courage, or the healing to speak truth to my children. I didn’t realize that silence, even when meant to protect, becomes its kind of abandonment.
Years later, I saw the cost in Kim’s eyes. She once said to me, “I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere—not to you, not to him.” And I understood, with a kind of ache that can’t be undone, that I had handed her the same void my mother handed me.
What I thought was protection was absence. And absence has a voice. It speaks in confusion, anger, estrangement—and sometimes, in silence that hardens into stone.
Kim didn’t cut me off all at once. It happened in layers, just like the silence I had wrapped around her story. As she grew older, our conversations thinned. Her responses sharpened. Eventually, I stopped being someone she turned to and became someone she turned away from.
There were long periods when we didn’t speak at all. Holidays came and went without a call. If we did speak, it was short, tense, clipped. Her voice carried the weight of everything I hadn’t said. She didn’t need to tell me she was angry. I felt it in the way she kept me at arm’s length.
One day, during one of our rare visits, she stood in my kitchen and said, “You never told me anything real.”
I looked up from my coffee cup, startled, “What do you mean?”
“You talk around things, not through them,” she said. “You never told me about my father. You never told me the truth about why you drank. You just left me to figure it all out on my own.”
I tried to respond, but all I could say was, “I didn’t know how.”
And it was true. I didn’t know how to tell her that I was terrified of repeating my mother’s mistakes, only to realize I was doing exactly that in my way. I hadn’t known how to admit that shame had become my mother’s tongue.
Kim was a strong, bright, and capable woman, but I could see she had built herself without half the blueprint. Not knowing where she came from left her vulnerable to the same inner questions I had grown up with: Am I wanted? Am I enough? Who do I belong to?
The silence between us wasn’t just personal. It was generational. It came from slavery, from survival, from a culture that told Black women to keep moving, keep coping, keep quiet. But that kind of silence doesn’t dissolve. It calcifies. And the more it hardens, the more it fractures what matters most: our relationships, our sense of self, our ability to love freely and fully.
I no longer believe that silence protects. I believe it starves. It leaves children hungry for identity, truth, for the right to ask and be answered.
My mother’s silence raised me, but it also wounded me. And for too long, I passed that same wound on, believing I was shielding my children from pain. But what I kept from them was clarity. Connection. Wholeness.
I can’t rewrite what was lost. I can’t go back and undo the hurt caused by what I couldn’t say. But I can tell the truth now. I can speak the names that were once buried. I can lay down the silence that shaped me, and refuse to let it shape the generations that follow.
Because there comes a time when silence is no longer strength, but surrender. And I am no longer willing to surrender my story.
I was raised in silence.
However, I choose to live in truth.
Reflection Prompt:
- What silences shaped your story?
- What truth wants to be spoken now?
- What might healing sound like in your life?
Raised By Silence
Breaking Generational Silence as a Black Mother, Daughter, and Survivor
I am grateful to share a new essay from my heart, “Raised By Silence,” now published in No More Margins Literary Journal. a digital literary journal uplifting the voices of Black women writers. Unlike previous reflections, this one journeys through the unspoken places of my past, where silence was both shield and shackle. Writing it brought tears, release, and deep gratitude for how far grace has carried me.
You can also read the full issue (for free!) starting October 19 at https://nomoremargins.com.
I grew up in a house where silence was a matter of survival. Not the peaceful kind, but the type that hums just under the skin. Tight. Watchful and always ready to snap. When I asked my mother about my father, her face hardened, as if she had swallowed glass. “Don’t ask me about him again,” she said. That was the end of it. He was schizophrenic, institutionalized for most of his life, and in my mother’s eyes, erased. That silence raised me. It taught me to hide my questions, bury my grief, and live around the gaps. Years later, I passed that same silence to my children, protecting them from truths I was too wounded to tell. But silence doesn’t protect. It disconnects. It isolates. And in my family, it nearly destroyed us.
My father’s name was rarely spoken in our home. When it was, it came laced with bitterness or cut short like a bad habit. He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager and spent most of his life in a mental hospital. I didn’t know what schizophrenia was when I was a child. I just knew my mother didn’t want his name in the air.
One day, I asked her why he didn’t come home. Her eyes narrowed, her whole face tightening like a fist. “Don’t ask me about him again,” she turned away. I didn’t. I swallowed my questions along with my tears. Her silence wasn’t gentle—it was absolute, like a door slammed shut.
Later, I would understand: my mother was carrying her silence, inherited from generations before her. As the granddaughter of enslaved people, she’d learned that survival sometimes meant suppressing what hurt. Talking about mental illness, failure, or loss wasn’t safe. It could bring shame, judgment, or worse. So, she didn’t speak. And I learned not to either.
But silence has a cost. It doesn’t just guard pain; it multiplies it. I began to wonder if there was something wrong with me. Did I remind her of him? Was that why her eyes went cold when I asked questions? Without answers, I filled the space with self-blame.
My father’s absence became a kind of haunting. I didn’t know his laugh, his scent, or his story—only that I came from someone no one was allowed to mention. And that absence shaped me. It taught me to hide the parts of myself that felt broken, to put on a strong façade while crumbling quietly inside.
That silence didn’t end with me. I carried it into adulthood, wearing it like armor. And one day, I passed it on.
By the time I had children of my own, I thought I’d left the past behind. But the truth is, silence travels quietly. It doesn’t shout its presence—it settles in your bones and becomes part of how you live, how you mother, how you explain—or don’t explain—the hardest parts of life.
When Kim (my daughter) was born, I was just nineteen and terrified. Felix, her father, was charming but volatile. One minute, he was tender. Next, he was threatening to take her if I gave her up for adoption. My mother, hardened by her history, warned me: “Don’t let that man near your baby. He’s wild enough to do something crazy.” I listened to her. And just like that, the pattern began again.
I didn’t tell Kim about her father, not the good, not the bad. I told myself it was to protect her. But the truth was, I didn’t know how to tell her a story; I hadn’t made peace with myself. How could I explain that I had once loved a man I now feared? That I had let her grow up without knowing half of who she was?
With my son, I did the same. His father—my first husband—died after years of addiction and chaos. I erased him, too. Not because I didn’t care, but because I didn’t have the words, or the courage, or the healing to speak truth to my children. I didn’t realize that silence, even when meant to protect, becomes its kind of abandonment.
Years later, I saw the cost in Kim’s eyes. She once said to me, “I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere—not to you, not to him.” And I understood, with a kind of ache that can’t be undone, that I had handed her the same void my mother handed me.
What I thought was protection was absence. And absence has a voice. It speaks in confusion, anger, estrangement—and sometimes, in silence that hardens into stone.
Kim didn’t cut me off all at once. It happened in layers, just like the silence I had wrapped around her story. As she grew older, our conversations thinned. Her responses sharpened. Eventually, I stopped being someone she turned to and became someone she turned away from.
There were long periods when we didn’t speak at all. Holidays came and went without a call. If we did speak, it was short, tense, clipped. Her voice carried the weight of everything I hadn’t said. She didn’t need to tell me she was angry. I felt it in the way she kept me at arm’s length.
One day, during one of our rare visits, she stood in my kitchen and said, “You never told me anything real.”
I looked up from my coffee cup, startled, “What do you mean?”
“You talk around things, not through them,” she said. “You never told me about my father. You never told me the truth about why you drank. You just left me to figure it all out on my own.”
I tried to respond, but all I could say was, “I didn’t know how.”
And it was true. I didn’t know how to tell her that I was terrified of repeating my mother’s mistakes, only to realize I was doing exactly that in my way. I hadn’t known how to admit that shame had become my mother’s tongue.
Kim was a strong, bright, and capable woman, but I could see she had built herself without half the blueprint. Not knowing where she came from left her vulnerable to the same inner questions I had grown up with: Am I wanted? Am I enough? Who do I belong to?
The silence between us wasn’t just personal. It was generational. It came from slavery, from survival, from a culture that told Black women to keep moving, keep coping, keep quiet. But that kind of silence doesn’t dissolve. It calcifies. And the more it hardens, the more it fractures what matters most: our relationships, our sense of self, our ability to love freely and fully.
I no longer believe that silence protects. I believe it starves. It leaves children hungry for identity, truth, for the right to ask and be answered.
My mother’s silence raised me, but it also wounded me. And for too long, I passed that same wound on, believing I was shielding my children from pain. But what I kept from them was clarity. Connection. Wholeness.
I can’t rewrite what was lost. I can’t go back and undo the hurt caused by what I couldn’t say. But I can tell the truth now. I can speak the names that were once buried. I can lay down the silence that shaped me, and refuse to let it shape the generations that follow.
Because there comes a time when silence is no longer strength, but surrender. And I am no longer willing to surrender my story.
I was raised in silence.
However, I choose to live in truth.
Reflection Prompt:
- What silences shaped your story?
- What truth wants to be spoken now?
- What might healing sound like in your life?
Raised By Silence
Breaking Generational Silence as a Black Mother, Daughter, and Survivor
I am grateful to share a new essay from my heart, “Raised By Silence,” now published in No More Margins Literary Journal. a digital literary journal uplifting the voices of Black women writers. Unlike previous reflections, this one journeys through the unspoken places of my past, where silence was both shield and shackle. Writing it brought tears, release, and deep gratitude for how far grace has carried me.
You can also read the full issue (for free!) starting October 19 at https://nomoremargins.com.
I grew up in a house where silence was a matter of survival. Not the peaceful kind, but the type that hums just under the skin. Tight. Watchful and always ready to snap. When I asked my mother about my father, her face hardened, as if she had swallowed glass. “Don’t ask me about him again,” she said. That was the end of it. He was schizophrenic, institutionalized for most of his life, and in my mother’s eyes, erased. That silence raised me. It taught me to hide my questions, bury my grief, and live around the gaps. Years later, I passed that same silence to my children, protecting them from truths I was too wounded to tell. But silence doesn’t protect. It disconnects. It isolates. And in my family, it nearly destroyed us.
My father’s name was rarely spoken in our home. When it was, it came laced with bitterness or cut short like a bad habit. He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager and spent most of his life in a mental hospital. I didn’t know what schizophrenia was when I was a child. I just knew my mother didn’t want his name in the air.
One day, I asked her why he didn’t come home. Her eyes narrowed, her whole face tightening like a fist. “Don’t ask me about him again,” she turned away. I didn’t. I swallowed my questions along with my tears. Her silence wasn’t gentle—it was absolute, like a door slammed shut.
Later, I would understand: my mother was carrying her silence, inherited from generations before her. As the granddaughter of enslaved people, she’d learned that survival sometimes meant suppressing what hurt. Talking about mental illness, failure, or loss wasn’t safe. It could bring shame, judgment, or worse. So, she didn’t speak. And I learned not to either.
But silence has a cost. It doesn’t just guard pain; it multiplies it. I began to wonder if there was something wrong with me. Did I remind her of him? Was that why her eyes went cold when I asked questions? Without answers, I filled the space with self-blame.
My father’s absence became a kind of haunting. I didn’t know his laugh, his scent, or his story—only that I came from someone no one was allowed to mention. And that absence shaped me. It taught me to hide the parts of myself that felt broken, to put on a strong façade while crumbling quietly inside.
That silence didn’t end with me. I carried it into adulthood, wearing it like armor. And one day, I passed it on.
By the time I had children of my own, I thought I’d left the past behind. But the truth is, silence travels quietly. It doesn’t shout its presence—it settles in your bones and becomes part of how you live, how you mother, how you explain—or don’t explain—the hardest parts of life.
When Kim (my daughter) was born, I was just nineteen and terrified. Felix, her father, was charming but volatile. One minute, he was tender. Next, he was threatening to take her if I gave her up for adoption. My mother, hardened by her history, warned me: “Don’t let that man near your baby. He’s wild enough to do something crazy.” I listened to her. And just like that, the pattern began again.
I didn’t tell Kim about her father, not the good, not the bad. I told myself it was to protect her. But the truth was, I didn’t know how to tell her a story; I hadn’t made peace with myself. How could I explain that I had once loved a man I now feared? That I had let her grow up without knowing half of who she was?
With my son, I did the same. His father—my first husband—died after years of addiction and chaos. I erased him, too. Not because I didn’t care, but because I didn’t have the words, or the courage, or the healing to speak truth to my children. I didn’t realize that silence, even when meant to protect, becomes its kind of abandonment.
Years later, I saw the cost in Kim’s eyes. She once said to me, “I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere—not to you, not to him.” And I understood, with a kind of ache that can’t be undone, that I had handed her the same void my mother handed me.
What I thought was protection was absence. And absence has a voice. It speaks in confusion, anger, estrangement—and sometimes, in silence that hardens into stone.
Kim didn’t cut me off all at once. It happened in layers, just like the silence I had wrapped around her story. As she grew older, our conversations thinned. Her responses sharpened. Eventually, I stopped being someone she turned to and became someone she turned away from.
There were long periods when we didn’t speak at all. Holidays came and went without a call. If we did speak, it was short, tense, clipped. Her voice carried the weight of everything I hadn’t said. She didn’t need to tell me she was angry. I felt it in the way she kept me at arm’s length.
One day, during one of our rare visits, she stood in my kitchen and said, “You never told me anything real.”
I looked up from my coffee cup, startled, “What do you mean?”
“You talk around things, not through them,” she said. “You never told me about my father. You never told me the truth about why you drank. You just left me to figure it all out on my own.”
I tried to respond, but all I could say was, “I didn’t know how.”
And it was true. I didn’t know how to tell her that I was terrified of repeating my mother’s mistakes, only to realize I was doing exactly that in my way. I hadn’t known how to admit that shame had become my mother’s tongue.
Kim was a strong, bright, and capable woman, but I could see she had built herself without half the blueprint. Not knowing where she came from left her vulnerable to the same inner questions I had grown up with: Am I wanted? Am I enough? Who do I belong to?
The silence between us wasn’t just personal. It was generational. It came from slavery, from survival, from a culture that told Black women to keep moving, keep coping, keep quiet. But that kind of silence doesn’t dissolve. It calcifies. And the more it hardens, the more it fractures what matters most: our relationships, our sense of self, our ability to love freely and fully.
I no longer believe that silence protects. I believe it starves. It leaves children hungry for identity, truth, for the right to ask and be answered.
My mother’s silence raised me, but it also wounded me. And for too long, I passed that same wound on, believing I was shielding my children from pain. But what I kept from them was clarity. Connection. Wholeness.
I can’t rewrite what was lost. I can’t go back and undo the hurt caused by what I couldn’t say. But I can tell the truth now. I can speak the names that were once buried. I can lay down the silence that shaped me, and refuse to let it shape the generations that follow.
Because there comes a time when silence is no longer strength, but surrender. And I am no longer willing to surrender my story.
I was raised in silence.
However, I choose to live in truth.
Reflection Prompt:
- What silences shaped your story?
- What truth wants to be spoken now?
- What might healing sound like in your life?