The Recorders

          I have very few photographs of my mother when she was a young woman.  There are photographs of her when she was a child; the black and white squares filled with her smiling face surrounded by her four siblings, framed with white, scalloped edges. Many of the photographs were taken outside, her head covered with a stocking cap and wearing overalls. It is clear from these pictures that my mother was a tomboy, while her sister was the princess. Faye wore the frilly dresses that my mother disdained. I think it’s ironic that when I was growing up, she always tried to get me to wear those same kinds of dresses. I was of the same mind as her; you can’t play baseball or cops and robbers in a dress.

            Why is it that it becomes the mother’s job to be the recorder of the family history? And because that is her job, she then seems absent from it. She has spent my entire life behind the camera. We have thousands and thousands of moments recorded, and it seems that she wasn’t a part of any of them. When she is gone from my life, I will have to rely on my memory of her as a young mother. And memory is a fickle thing.

            I think it is the job of all mother’s to record – I have few pictures of my grandmother as a young woman as well.  There are pictures of her as a child, and as a Navy officer, but the minute she got married and started having children, the photos became about her family and not about her. Is this an observation about motherhood in general? Do we put so much of ourselves into the lives of our children and husbands that we seem absent? Or is it that we are the Mighty Oz, the wo(man) behind the curtain taking care of all the details that come with family life.

            I have been working on putting all of the family photos into albums for the last 10 years or so and it shocks me every time that there is a ratio of about 50:1 pictures without my mother and pictures with her. The most pictures were of her when she was pregnant with me. My favorite picture is of her at her baby shower, her red hair cut into a 1970’s pageboy. She is wearing a blue sundress and her stomach is huge with an 8-month baby belly.  There are two things about the photo that are striking. The first, that she is smoking and drinking a martini. I am not offended by this. She didn’t know how bad that was for babies, and it is a historical marker of the time. It is a bit shocking to new viewers, because I think we forget how recent medical discoveries about smoking have changed our view on this habit. The second thing is that Mom looks sublimely happy. She is radiant and dazzling, laughing in the picture at something someone said. You can tell that she is ecstatic to become a mother. This picture, though now missing, is my most precious piece of memorabilia of my mother.  When I think about this picture, I know that she was completely committed to the idea of motherhood. She may not have known what to expect, she may not have known she was about to become the recorder, the memory, for her family, but she welcomed the job just the same; with glee and an open heart. Even though she is still with me, and I hope to have her for many, many more years, this is how I always think of her.