Happy New Year! It’s still January, so it still counts, right? I am going to try to blog more in 2018. As long as I stay unemployed, this should be easy. Right?

I spent some time with family over the weekend. My aunt had recently gone through lots of old family photos, and had brought me an envelope of them. Some I had seen before, and some I hadn’t. There was one of my mom and I that struck me in particular.

You see, I have been saying for years that no pictures exist of my mom and I together. By that, I mean ones of just her and I. Her holding me as a baby, for example. While it was the mid 70s and people didn’t take a hundred photos in one day of their babies, I still found it odd that (for example), on my Baptism day she isn’t holding me in any of the pictures. My godmother, her sister in law, is holding me in all of them. She stands off to the side (as she does in all ‘family’ photos of the four of us), as completely removed as possible – at least to the photographic eye. In general, few baby photos of me exist. I have none (obviously) from birth, and they only start around age four months when the adoption was finalized. I have several pictures of my dad and I together; always snuggled up and smiling big. I just find it so weird that I don’t have any like that with my mom. The old adage of the first child having all the pictures partially comes into play here I am sure, as I have seen a few pictures of her holding my older brother (also adopted) as a baby.

So imagine my shock when, tucked into this thin pile of old Kodak prints, was a picture of Mom and I sitting on my aunt’s back porch. I am busy playing with something very intently in my lap, knees propped up, unaware that my photograph is being taken. My mom is sitting next to me, and there is a small side table between us. She is aware the picture is being taken, and is looking at the camera. She is not smiling, big or otherwise. All of her body language is, once again, removing herself from the situation. My husband noticed it immediately without me saying a word. “That explains it all”, he said. In that short phrase, he completely surmised my relationship with her.

The older I get (44 in three weeks – eek!), the more I realize that is true. The “connection”, the bond, that most healthy mother-daughter relationships have, isn’t missing from our relationship. It isn’t missing, because it was never there. It’s a sobering thought to write out, and one that I don’t write lightly. I’ve spent an extraordinary amount of time thinking about this over the last fourteen years. My husband (a wonderful free therapist – shout out to M!) once said to me “You cannot mourn what you never had”. Well, I don’t think that is necessarily true. I mourn for the loss all the time, in different ways. Mostly when I notice other mother-daughter relationships, which presents itself as jealousy on my end. Watching my cousins with their mom (my aunt). I have a lot of cousins. They all have involved, loving, expressive parents who dote on them and their children. I had a conversation not too long ago with my brother, G, about how difficult it is to observe that and interact with that – as an outsider. And our own relationships with our mom and dad are not the same as theirs with their parents, nor could they ever be. While I am rather close with my dad, the relationship is complicated by the fact that (I think) he often feels he has to “chose” between my mom/his wife and me. Neither of them are in the best of health, and she doesn’t drive or really even go outside anymore, so he feels he can’t leave her for long (to visit me and two of his five grand kids, for example). My brother, who only lives an hour and a half from our parents, has the opposite problem. He has the ability to visit often but chooses not to a lot of the time, because of how difficult my mom is. (sidebar: I have always thought G was the favored child, and not just because he has more baby pictures that I do)

I love family photos, old photos especially, because they are proof that we existed before now. Proof that we were, that we are. In terms of this lone, solitary picture of my mother and I, I suppose that proof is all it is.

“I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you, that I almost believe that they’re real.

…there was nothing in the world that I ever wanted more than to feel you, deep in my heart. There was nothing in the world that I ever wanted more than to never feel the breaking apart all my pictures of you.” – The Cure