The Silence Inside Families

I wasn’t ashamed of my child. I was ashamed of being seen as the mom who couldn’t fix it.

There is a particular kind of silence that lives inside families navigating mental health crises.

It is not the silence of not having words. Most of us have plenty of words. We use them constantly, in waiting rooms and school meetings and late-night conversations with our spouses. We become fluent in languages we never asked to learn: diagnostic criteria, medication side effects, insurance appeal processes, crisis protocols.

The silence I am talking about is the one we keep with everyone else.

The colleagues who ask how the kids are doing and get a fine. The friends who notice something is off and get reassured. The extended family members who are kept at a careful distance from the full picture. The professional identity that gets maintained, carefully and deliberately, so that what is happening at home does not follow you into the room.

I kept that silence for a long time.

And I want to be honest about why, because I think the honest reason matters more than the comfortable one.

It was not only about protecting my child’s privacy, though that was real. It was not only about not knowing how people would respond, though that was real too.

It was about me.

I was ashamed of being seen as the mom who couldn’t fix it. The one whose family was struggling in ways that did not resolve on a reasonable timeline. The one who had spent a career understanding healthcare systems and still could not get her own child what he needed. There was a story I had told myself about who I was, competent, capable, someone who figured things out, and what was happening at home did not fit that story.

So I managed the narrative. I disclosed just enough to explain an absence or a distracted moment, and then I pulled the curtain back across.

What I did not understand then is that the silence was not protecting anyone.

It was not protecting my child, who needed me to be connected to people who could support me so I could keep showing up for him. It was not protecting my family, who could feel the isolation even when they could not name it. And it was not protecting me. It was keeping me locked in a story that was costing me more than I knew.

The stigma around mental health does not just keep people from getting help. It reaches into the families around them and teaches everyone in the household to stay quiet. To manage impressions. To perform a version of normal that has nothing to do with what is actually true.

Breaking that silence did not happen all at once. It started small. One trusted friend who got the real version. Then a therapist who helped me see what the performance was costing me. Then, eventually, a decision to write it all down and put it in a book.

That last step was the most public version of speaking up I have ever done. But it started long before the book. It started the first time I told the truth to someone who was not required to keep my confidence.

If you are holding something heavy and silent right now, you do not have to publish a memoir to put it down. You just have to tell one person.

Start there.

This is part of the Notes for the Caregivers series, published throughout May for Mental Health Awareness Month. If you want these essays in your inbox, subscribe below.

Fighting for Their Lives publishes June 16.

💚 Jenn