My mother's face

Another essay I found while cleaning emails.

Twenty-eight young sepia faces stared at me from a composite photo. It had been sent to celebrate my 60^th birthday by a friend with whom I’d shared secrets for at least three-quarters of my life. 

On it was a Post-it. “My uncle is in the top row, can you find your mother? It’s the fifth grade class at Highland Street School.”

A quick calculation put the year at 1927, two years before the Great Depression. Some of those boys with the jagged haircuts would fight in World War II. One women would be crippled in the 1953 polio epidemic and spend the rest of her life in an iron lung.  Another would have a son, my classmate, who would die in Vietnam. One ended up an alcoholic. 

I don’t know which face belonged to which future, but I’d heard enough stories from my mother about her school chums to know hard lives awaited them. But in the photographer-conscious smiles none of those young faces showed any fear.

In the middle of the second row from the bottom was my mother. I knew my grandmother had made the dress my mother wore, because, I’d heard stories that my grandmother made all her clothes. My mother coveted store-bought clothes, but her first off-the-rack dress was in junior high, two years away. 

And I also knew that my mother had been driven to school that day in a Black Ford. My grandparents were the first people in town to have a car, and my grandmother was known as "The Lady with the Ford."

 

I had never seen pictures of my mother as a child, but I still recognized her. The face was my face and my daughter’s face. To double check I took the sheet across the hall to my Syrian neighbor. “Can you pick out my mother?” I asked.

Without hesitation Marina touched the woman I’d identified. “She looks like the Kid.” 

Both my daughter and Marina are in their thirties. Because Marina was my friend first, she thinks of us as contemporaries and my daughter as “The Kid” or “The Brat” both names, which I use with greater love than the words imply.

Afterwards I went home and put the photo on a shelf. My mother’s eyes followed me. I thought about the face shared by three generations of women. I wondered how many other women through the years looked like us. The genes had to be strong to keep reappearing.

Would we have recognized, Elizabeth, our first known relative who died in Maine in 1636? 

Did our face wait for a soldier to come home from one of Oliver Cromwell’s battles? 

Did it witness the carnage at the Battle of Hastings or watch a pagan solstice at Stonehenge?   

I want to know more about them, ask them questions about their lives.

I saw nothing of the bitterness and anger that would mark my mother’s face in years to come in that ten-year old girl staring at me. 

I have long since forgiven her for trying to annul my marriage and take my daughter away from me. 

Finally out of the bad times have come good memories of sitting and treating ourselves to smoked sausage and strawberries as we played Scrabble, buying clothes and eating baked stuffed lobster at the Oat & Anchor. 

I use her good ways to build my relationship with my daughter, and I have enough friends who have promised to hit me if I copy the bad. It has worked. When my daughter comes we laugh, tell stories and secrets.

My daughter, who shows no interest in making me a grandmother, still won’t be the last owner of this face. My brother’s daughter is the face’s newest owner, sharing the chubby cheeks and the high forehead. She will probably lead a more conventional life than my daughter and continue our genetics to future generations.

As I climb into bed, my mother still looks at me as she did when I was little. Only this night she won’t read The Bobbsey Twins or Thornton W. Burgess to me. 

For the first time since she died over 14 years before, I want to call her and say, “Guess what I have,” but I know there are no phones there. 

I realise that my friend, a half a world away, has given me a far greater gift than an old photograph for my birthday. She has given me a new past, one that was always there. 

I just didn’t’ know it.