Archiving My Mother
I took an essay class at the Gotham Writers Workshop. Thanks to fellow Gotham students for pushing me to dig deeper. This is the essay that pushed me to consider my own creative life and what it might mean to archive it. The novel she wrote, Sisters Between, is included in the Manuscript Repository.
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, but somehow, 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 above a fireplace. In the photograph she wears 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.
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.
As I excavated down through the layers, my fingers turned 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’d kept a journal, 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. 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. And yet, if my hunch is correct and she kept those portraits 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. I’m still learning the lesson that objects are not the source of the pain.
A few months ago, I found another photo of my mother that I had never seen before. In the snapshot, she is standing alone on a terrace in some sundrenched place laughing – mouth wide open, head thrown back, throat exposed. This is the woman my children knew when they were growing up. The grandmother who burst into song, who loved to play card games, who laughed with abandon. But I had my doubts that this is the woman they would see in her journals.
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, 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.
I live in my parents’ house now. I think my mother would approve of the way we renovated it. And still I find her here, 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. This is where she is archived, in us.
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