i’m in the process of scanning old photos and storing them online. mostly for my daughter, but also as a method of reviewing and parsing and passing through the last lingering hurts of early life.
i came across one photo in particular. in it, my mother and grandmother are displaying me to the camera. i’m four months old and the expression on my face is humorous. i look rather disgruntled and not at all happy.
but it is the expressions of my mother and grandmother than capture me in this moment. my mother, only 18 at the time, looks shyly proud. there are hints of things in her face, in her eyes, looking now, knowing the history, i can see them so clearly. her life was one disappointment after another, one let down after another, her family abandoning her for her choice of husband and later, her husband abandoning her too, but not before abusing her and stripping away the last of her self-respect and all of her dignity.
but in this moment, she is soft, shy, proud, and hopeful. it shines from her face. how i wish i had known her better. by the time i was old enough to want to, she was long lost to the scotch… anger and bitterness a constant cloak and wandering the labrynth of her own choices and mistakes. my presence, more a reminder of her failures it seemed… and too often her history… and my own… impeded our connection in any but the most transitory ways.
she died in 2003, while i was in houston. aneurysm. at the time, we had been estranged from one another for a good six years. i was unable to attend her funeral, circumstances being what they were. i’d have to look up her records to even know where they laid her to rest. so much time, wasted. i wish i could have told her so many things. i wish she had been able to hear any of them.
my grandmother, in this photo, is all but glowing with love for me. i was the first female born of a new generation, so naturally, there was a bit of a fuss over me. of all the family i ever had, my grandmother was the only one even close to normalcy, though it was years until i really understood this was the case.
i have spent many years feeling cut off from family, this being as much a figurative as literal thing. most were too dysfunctional to endure for more than moments, and those who were normal remained in such proximity to the dysfunctional that often it was difficult to see there was a difference.
but here, now, looking at the photographs, taken before time and circumstance cut so much to pieces… i can see the hope and promise of that time, and i can see there was so much there… and it is a comfort and an ache all at once. there’s something about lost potential that hurts more than potential’s lacking. i suppose i could define it, but i suspect it is common enough to the human condition that i need not try.
i remember one of the last conversations i had with my mother. she was telling me how she felt she’d missed out on so much of life. she told me she wanted to be a teacher. i was bursting with ideas on how that could happen, wanting more than anything to be the one to help her find the way from the past to happiness. but she had long ago given up and my words and ideas and willingness to help were farther than she could reach.
she wasn’t much older than i am now when we had that conversation. i remember being angry that she wouldn’t let me help, and i remember being angry that she was giving up. it felt, in many ways, as if she wasn’t just giving up on herself, but on me, too.
i miss her, but it is a distant thing. all that’s left are regrets and the sense of how precious time really is… and how eager we often are to ignore the truth of it.
i look at this photograph and wonder for a moment the great ‘what if’… but it is too painful to consider for long.