My
mother, who passed away a month ago, was a beautiful woman. Here is a photo of her looking Ingrid
Bergman-esque in her 1949 passport photo, when she was 29.
Of course, the bloom was off the rose by the
time she passed at nearly 94, but I remember her as still pretty all the way through
her 60s, and holding her own after that.
Something
that I also remember is admiring the fact that she didn’t wear, and didn’t need
to wear, much makeup. During the
years when I still lived at home, I don’t remember her using anything more than
lipstick. So,
why, when she died, did I find drawers full of makeup? Not just lipstick, but face powder and eyeliner, too. Seriously, I threw away a
couple of bags of the stuff.
I
am left asking: Was the no-makeup
thing all in my mind? Sure I knew
that she tried to put on lipstick up until a couple of years before she died –
frequently to comic effect, as her eyesight was failing. But dozens of lipsticks? And the face powder? And eyeliner? Who was this woman?
I
think that is a question that we all wind up asking when we are left with the
remnants of a parent’s life.
I
did my best to tell my mom’s story at her memorial service, but what do any of us know really about our parents’ early lives?* Sure I remember stories that my parents told, but I can’t
really picture their lives before I came along when they were 29 and 37. In fact, I have no clear memories of
them until I was probably 12 years old, when my mom was in her early 40s and my
dad was pushing 50. So what am I
to make of the very early photos of them that I am currently sifting through?
Like
this one, for instance . . .
My mother never even had a driver’s license. What is she doing on this
motorcycle? I know that my dad had
motorcycles in his youth. Is she
posing for him? Or did she have a life as a motorcycle driver that I know
nothing about?
And
how about this picture of my dad, which I suspect was taken when he and my
mother were preparing to hike in the highlands, as they often did in their youth?
Can this impossibly young man really be my
father?
So this
is what I am thinking about today: We really have no access to our parents' early lives in any three-dimensional kind of way. We don't have the cultural reference points, except as dusty history. What can I really know about what it was like to grow up in Scotland and experience a world war? (Two for my father, if you count his early childhood.) What can I know about what it felt like to leave family and friends behind and immigrate to another country? And then another? What do I know about their passions and their fears?
And the same will be true for our children. There is the stuff that we don't want to share and the stuff that we are afraid will bore them. And even the stuff they want to hear about will be one-dimensional for them as well. My daughters didn't know me as a skinny, awkward elementary school student. They never knew a world where nearly all mothers stayed at home and kids played freely on the street until called in for dinner. They can't know what it was like to be a teenager in the '60s. (Awesome.) They can't know what it felt like to scream my lungs out at a Beatles concert or to go "down the shore" with my friends in New Jersey. They weren't there (thank God) for my early marriage at 23-going-on-17, when someone should have mentioned that I did not have the emotional maturity to even be thinking about marriage. And so much more.
Each generation is a mystery to the next. And why shouldn't it be? Where would we put all of those feelings if we could really experience what our parents experienced?
And still, as I sort through my mother's photograph collection, I am so grateful to have a window -- however one-dimensional -- on her world.
* I
shared a bit of my parents’ story in an earlier post: ROOTS (or where is the place we call home?)
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