I see you.
- Navi people, Avatar
See me, feel me
Touch me, heal me.
- Go to the Mirror!, Tommy, The Who
My mother refused to take photographs of me. She said she wasn’t good at taking pictures. I remember one exception when I was a child. We were all in the yard, my father had his camera, and I urged her, as if she were the child, to try. My father, sister and I became the audience to her show as she exaggerated awkwardness with the camera, laughed, snapped a few shots in my direction. When the film was developed, I saw the photos before they were thrown away, one with my forehead, one of blue sky where I didn’t appear at all.
She did see me. She and I were sitting at the dining room table on a hot summer afternoon, drinking Coca-Cola from ice-filled glasses. I was about sixteen. Only as an adult did I learn that the expression that came upon her face was an alarm to change the subject determinedly, desperately. My mother assumed the look of a scholar, who, upon examination and discernment, was uttering an incisive, indisputable truth.
“You'd be pretty if you didn’t have such a big nose,” she said.
***
My mother died six months ago.
Her personal traits accompany me through genetics and choice. Her iconoclasm? Yes, please.
With regard to the traits of her relationship with me, I am practicing examination and discernment. Some have left a troubling, dark, legacy. I loved my mother passionately, devotedly, so earnestly, with my whole heart and soul, and would have given anything, perhaps my own life, to please her, to relieve her of any dissatisfaction, to make her happy, to earn a mother’s love from her. A child, then a teenager, isn’t conscious, or dares not be, of any oddness in the nature of the behavior of the parent. And the expanse of love a dependent child feels for a parent leaves no room for consciousness.
As an adult, however, from the edge of the growing space between my mother's presence and her absence, I am becoming aware of beliefs from the past that leaped the gap and accompany me in the present.
I have a face not even a mother could love.
I have been told enough times by enough mothers of other children that this is not true, that if I had been their child, they would have loved my face and me, no matter what. But a child sees a mother's actions and hears her words, waits for what a mother doesn't do and listens for what she doesn't say.
The short story: The conflict I witnessed within myself between dark and light while being photographed for a book cover was epic. Light won, but gee. It took me three days to recover from a photo shoot.
The long story: Our noses continue to grow as we age, drooping at the tip so they appear even larger. My grandmother lived to be 101, so I’ve had a glimpse of my future, mon panache.
My grandmother, who died three months ago, had a face a granddaughter could, and did, with all her heart, love.
My mother had a face a daughter could, and did, with her whole being, love.
Let me look in the mirror.