Personal Essay: The Photo Collection

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Ever the hoarder, my mother held onto an astonishing number of photos. As massive as her collections of antique toys, handbags, James Patterson books, shoes, clothes, and beanie babies each were, her photo collection dwarfed all of them combined. We found them everywhere --- in frames on display on the walls, in shoeboxes, lying out on random pieces of furniture, in frames buried beneath piles of junk in random corners, or packed away in long-neglected cardboard boxes. Photo albums spilled from her bookcase and took up shelving in her bedroom closets.

In addition, there were hundreds of loose photos. I’m not aware of every hiding spot, since we all sorted out different rooms at different times, but I did discover the motherload of loose photos when I opened an enormous, wicker chest at the foot of my mother’s bed.

My niece Shari and I spent hours sorting through these, filling in the gaps of each other’s knowledge. I named the people in all O’Toole and post-O’Toole era photos, while my niece could easily identify my mother’s first husband (who was her father’s father). We sorted the pictures into piles according to era, and as their chronology emerged I saw the narrative of my mother’s life laid out in a way I never had before.

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In black and white, an apple-cheeked toddler stands smiling on a stoop. According to the date stamp, she is my mother at age 3. In pictures taken soon after this earliest photo, a sour-faced woman starts to appear in frame with her. She is my mother’s mother. Throughout the professional portraits and family snapshots of my mother’s upbringing, my grandmother makes each image seem a little darker. It’s as if she brings a cloud of tension and fear wherever she appears.

By the time my mother reaches her teen years, she carries a melancholy that reveals itself in a few of the family snapshots. Always posed with a movie star’s grace, the slim teenager stares off with eyes that betray a storm within.

By the time she reaches her late teens, she has learned to smile for the camera regardless of how she feels, and there’s a stubborn vivacity to her grin. She often poses in swimsuits, and at this age her tall frame is enviably slim and statuesque. I never knew her stomach could be so flat --- my stomach has never been so flat.

Soon enough the images depict her as a teenaged bride (just 18 years old), then as a young mother to my brother and sister. She looks so young for the job that it’s startling, and at times she looks startled herself. Having grown up in chaos and now the mother of two small children, her face betrays hints of confusion and worry. The pictures reveal a few early mistakes, like making her son and daughter kiss on the mouth in a way that makes the two small children look more like miniature lovers than siblings. My mother was never good at understanding boundaries, especially when it came to physical affection.

As she becomes a working single mother, most snapshots show her in the kitchen or office. She’s still slim and statuesque, and her style is impeccable. She could have had a starring role on Mad Men. It isn’t just how she dresses, but the way she carries herself --- a straight back, a knowing smirk, short skirts that allow her to wield her long, toned legs like weapons, and a keen intelligence in her enormous green eyes.

Fast forward to the wedding of my mother and father. My father is a little chubby and just starting to bald, but handsome in a young Charles Grodin sort of way. I recognize my apple cheeks and stubborn chin in his features, and when he faces the camera my own eyes stare back at me.

There are honeymoon pictures. My parents stayed at a rustic hotel somewhere cold, with an indoor pool. Dad shows off, making silly faces and dramatic jumps into the water, but my mother is effortlessly radiant. She sits in a swimsuit hugging her knees to her chest, and her smile could light up a city.

In the hotel lobby, they lean against each other on a bench, holding hands while fast asleep.

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My whole life, my mother and father were never affectionate with each other, at least not in front of me. They always seemed more like partners in raising me, who more often than not bitterly hated each other. To see them snuggled up, trusting and peaceful, made something undeniably clear to me. Something I never would have believed before this photo. That at one point, my mother and father had loved each other.

Shortly after I discovered the picture, my sister noticed me staring at it. I told her it had really struck me.

“Because they look so young?” she asked.

“Because they look so...affectionate.”

She patted me on the back and stepped away. Not for the first time or the last, I waited until she was gone before bursting into tears.

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Soon enough are the photos where I enter the story. The first snapshot shows a doctor holding up a screaming newborn still covered in womb stuff, my mother’s knee in the foreground. It’s officially the first picture ever taken of me. (Thanks, Dad.)

I’m doted on as an infant and toddler. Over time, my father appears less in the photos.

A few images show my sister alone with me. In almost every one, this tiny version of myself appears oblivious as an invisible weight presses down on my sister. The loneliness, deep fear, sadness, and the strain of her situation cloud her lovely features.

There’s a professional studio photo of my mother and I practically cheek to cheek. She’s started to carry a bit of extra weight, which gives her pencil-thin eyebrows a severe quality. Despite her elegant style and softly upturned mouth, there’s a sour sharpness to her eyes. I’m about four, and even though my mouth forms a smile, my eyes look afraid.

Around this time, there are a few more images where the camera catches me afraid or despairing, just as it did my sister and our mother before us.

But there are others where I’m giggling like a maniac, or grinning big enough to show every tooth in my mouth. I’m laughing at my father, who’s been making faces and silly jokes behind the camera. By the time I’m five or six, I’m very good at replicating this smile on cue.

As my mother ushers me through childhood, there are moments where she appears lucid, even radiant again. But many pictures depict her as tense, haughty, anxious, angry, smiling through gritted teeth or staring at the camera through manic eyes.

My father vanishes from the photos shortly before he and my mother separate. Just a few years later, my stepfather enters the narrative. My mother ripped him out of many photos, but not all of them. Let’s say he was not a good man, and leave it at that.

The photos of this era take my mother and I through my high school years. I’m doing well in school. Images capture high school musicals and academic awards ceremonies, me hugging the friends I’d made. In others my mother and I stand close and smile together, though my smile is starting to strain a bit as I get older.

Soon after this I leave home, defying my mother’s wishes to forego an education, career, and other relationships for the sake of being her sole caretaker and companion. She’s a healthy, capable, charismatic woman, but I’ll still struggle with this decision before acting on it. When I do, it goes so badly that I abruptly vanish from the photos. Instead, pictures show my mother gradually getting on with her life. She spends time with friends and work buddies, and embraces adventure once more. My brother and sister each reappear at intervals, sometimes with their families, striving to have a relationship with our mother. But these phases are always temporary.

About seven years after vanishing from the photos I appear for one last trip. In the years to come, I’ll call it the reunion trip.

By this point, I’ve completely forgotten how to make a convincing smile for the camera, though it hasn’t stopped me from trying. A picture shows my mother and I seated close on a couch in her new house. My face and body are tense, despite my attempts to play it affably cool. My mother’s health has been bad, and it shows. Unkempt and a bit wild-eyed, she clutches me close.

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A picture I’ll someday consider having framed shows my brother, my sister, my niece, my mother and I all lined up together, smiling for the camera beneath a cloudy sky. It is the last photo that will ever be taken of us all together.

From there, my mother continues as she always has. Making new friends, visiting new places. Somewhere along the way, the excellent taste and style of her youth are replaced by an unironic fondness for kitsch. Honestly, her taste is all over the map, along with her levels of basic self-care. At times she looks wonderful; at others, I want to step into the photo so I can give her a good hot bath and dress her myself.

Her last romantic love, James, appears. Together they take many outings, plus trips to Nova Scotia, Ireland, and Branson, Missouri (the home of her first love). The photos reveal how old my mother has gotten, how decades of addiction and mental illness have left her body seemingly neglected and fatigued beyond its years. But her grin is broad, and her eyes are bright.

She is determined to suck joy out of life, and it is only as I write these lines that I realize what I inherited from her. That determination to live joyfully, to make the most of each day, to suck the marrow out of life (to borrow the phrase). As with all things I’ve inherited from her, I’m responsible for making better use of this.

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My brother would select about five or so photos for my mother’s funeral display, but I remember three in particular: the young debutante with movie-star beauty, the lovely, middle-aged mother of three, radiantly in love for the third time in her life, and the old woman grinning outside her home. In this most recent photo, her once large green eyes are now glassy beads, and a gap reveals the teeth she lost in a car accident many years before --- but her back is straight and her smile is defiantly broad. She is radiant. I saved this picture to my phone and to a cloud server, so I can see it whenever I need to remind myself how her story ended.

I took dozens of these photos home, and invested in photo albums of my own. I’ve not only started taking more photos, but I’ve become much less vain about the pictures I appear in. I’ve abandoned the idea that anyone needs to look perfect or pretty in a photograph. That’s not what pictures are for. They are pieces of the narrative.