Archiving My Mother
I found the framed portraits of my mother as a young woman wedged between a stack of suitcases and a metal filing cabinet in my parents’ basement. We were a military family, packing and unpacking every few years, yet I had never seen those portraits before. There are two of them, one a black and white photograph and one a painting, both large enough to hang in pride-of-place above a fireplace. She appears younger in the photograph than in the painting, wearing a gauzy, sleeveless white dress, her Delta Gamma sorority pin above her heart – at Florida State in the 1950s, joining a sorority was what young women did. One hand lies across the other, displaying a delicate bracelet, a neat manicure. Her smile seems tentative, though perhaps it’s just that the photo is old and fading. The oil painting has held up better; the colors are stronger. She seems stronger. Black, V-neck drape, red lipstick, white teeth. This is the woman who excelled as a student and graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors.
It was family lore that my mother avoided having her picture taken when she could, gritted her teeth and forced a smile when she couldn’t. I inherited that trait, nurture rather than nature. We shared the fear of how others would judge us. That the person who appeared in the image would not reflect who we wanted the world to see. And yet, she kept those portraits.
Five years after she died, the responsibility of cleaning out the house and sorting through her papers fell to me. It made sense. I am an archivist and my siblings were far flung. “Whatever you decide is fine with us,” they said, assuming I would know the value of things. My father, for whom the house had become a burden, said the same.
I excavated down through the layers, fingers sticky with dust. Furniture, lamps, artwork, dishes, books – objects that could be sold or given away – that was the easy part. Her bedroom was the hardest. Her favorite wash-worn jeans, her engagement and wedding rings, her nightstand with throat lozenges and packets of tissues and scraps of yellow notepaper bearing indecipherable messages. A small bookshelf held half a dozen clothbound journals. Her distinctive forward-slanted cursive filled the pages.
Little by little I emptied the house, but the journals and the portraits remained. I knew she kept a journal – I’d gifted her a few over the years – but I didn’t understand how I’d never seen the portraits. I was an incorrigible snoop when I was a kid, the first one of my siblings to find where the Christmas presents were stashed. My grandmother died the summer before I left for college, and my mother and her sister divided the contents of the family home in central Florida. I think she brought the portraits back with her, though my father disagrees. He had retired from the air force by then – no more moves, no more discarding what no longer held value – so the portraits remained where my mother sequestered them in an oversize black garbage bag between the metal cabinet and the suitcases. If my hunch was right and she kept them for nearly forty years, shouldn’t I?
But then what about the journals? Sometimes, when I passed through her room, I’d take one from the shelf and flip through the pages just to see her handwriting. I’d read a line or two then snap the book closed; afraid the next words might hold an icy truth with sharp edges. I tried to convince myself that my mother would have destroyed the journals herself if she knew what lay ahead for her, though maybe I’m measuring with my own ruler. I’ve always been good at culling my possessions, all those moves when I was young.
My mother was unhappy and depressed in the middle years of her life. She chaffed in the role of officer’s wife and pined for a career that came almost too late. When I was young, I felt her frustration as blame. I avoided her, avoided the unhappiness that seeped through the house like a heavy, suffocating humidity. Avoidance became a habit I’ve found hard to break. When my golden retriever, the sunny companion who helped me raise two children, died I gathered all her beds and toys and leashes into a garbage bag the next day. I thought it would hurt less to whisk it all out of sight. I hadn’t learned the lesson that objects are not the source of the pain.
I visited my aunt in Texas several months ago. In the piles of photos stacked around her apartment was another picture of my mother I had never seen before. She is standing alone on a terrace in some sundrenched place laughing, joyful, mouth wide open, head thrown back, throat exposed. My guess is that it was taken by my father on a trip they took to Mexico without three kids in tow. This is the woman my children knew when they were growing up. The grandmother who burst into song, the one who loved to play card games, who laughed with abandon. But I had my doubts that this is who they would see in her journals.
Archivists are trained not only to preserve old papers and letters but to assess the value of them as well. That power has led to an absence in the historical record of voices that are not white and male, voices that the archivists of that time usually white and male or trained by those who were believed held no value. Was I doing the same as I attempted to archive my mother? In her memoir, The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Mother-Daughter Story, Laura Davis writes:
“And what if I died tomorrow? Would I want my kids to see this stuff? To read my old journals? To be burdened by them? To learn about the humiliating love affairs and coke binges of my twenties? To read my doubts about parenting and my marriage? To see my
weak hidden places?”
I wanted to believe I was protecting her, but maybe I was silencing a voice that would cause pain, cause me pain. And if I didn’t discard them then what? Do I leave them behind for my children to decide what to do with them? Do I find an institutional archive willing to preserve them in perpetuity exposing her to the eyes of strangers?
My mother earned a master’s degree, worked as an editor for the Department of Education, researched and published a novel about an order of religious women set in thirteenth century Belgium. Then dementia stole her ability to use a computer, drive a car, brush her teeth. It turned her petulant and demanding, then childlike and unfiltered. It was hard to know how much she understood what was happening to her. I never asked. We were not a family that talked about hard things.
In the end, self-preservation (or was it cowardice?) won out. I stacked my mother’s cloth bound journals in a black trash bag and added it to the other bags in the discard pile. I couldn’t bear to imagine my children or grandchildren or strangers reading her private thoughts. They might catch glimpses of my mother naked and would not know to avert their eyes. The portraits she hid behind the file cabinet in the basement, those I’ve kept, appropriately housed in acid-free archival-quality boxes.
A few weeks ago, I visited my mother’s headstone at Arlington National Cemetery where her ashes are inurned. “She’s not here,” my father said, arranging flowers on the grass. She wasn’t there nor in the portraits I kept or the journals I threw away. I live in my parents’ house now, renovated in a way in which I hope my mother would approve. This is where I find her. In the garden outside my bedroom window where she placed a cement casting of a lion lying down with a lamb, in the living room where she sat for hours with a book open in her lap. I see her in these places the same way I see her in the freckles on my shins and the soul-deep brown of my children’s eyes because she is archived in me.
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