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Notes For An Archaeology of the Mother by Diane McPherson Part Three of Five Parts Note about this essay
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Part III: Discovering the Mummy Write as thorough a description of your mother as you possibly can. Imagine you have just unearthed a woman from another time during an archaeological dig; look at her as objectively as possible. Describe her for someone who has never seen her. Omit no identifying details. Don't just write about a face. Compare it to your own face, to your sisters' faces, make us see it young, before your arrival, and then older, marked by time. Compare her to Lauren Hutton or Kathy Bates, Bella Abzug or Johnny Cash. For looking at your mother objectively, photographs are especially useful. Try to find her favorite photograph, as well as your own; compare them and write about both. And don't just describe a static face. Show us what she's doing from the neck down, how she moves, what she wears, how she seems to relate to the camera. What is the landscape she is surrounded by? Where is that landscape located in the country, world, and universe? Once, when my four sisters and I were getting ready for our brother's wedding, setting our hair around the dining room table, my father suddenly showed us my mother's high school portrait. "You girls will never be as pretty as your mother was," he informed us. This startled us; we had never heard him say this about her before, and weren't aware that he knew where this portrait was kept. At first I took his remark as an insult; later, I was touched by its sincerity, rare for him. Later still, I was mystified as to what had prompted the sentiment. I have a copy of this photograph, tattered at one corner from being carried for years in my uncle's wallet. My mother is seventeen. Even in black and white she is healthy, glowing, her shining hair and eyes reflecting the photographer's lights. I know from her stories that she rinsed her hair in stale beer to make it shiny, that she set it in pin curls. It is dark, nearly black, and falls in an unlikely sausage of curls high on her forehead, in looser curls to her shoulders. Her eyes, although I cannot see their color, are the only green eyes in her family, the color called hazel; under thick dark brows they are deep and serious, looking just past the photographer, who is probably encouraging her to smile. She is smiling, but with the faintest hint of sadness--a mouth smile, not an eye smile, pulling her cheeks into deep lines on either side of her mouth. Her nose, which she has never liked for some reason, is long and straight, her upper lip narrow, the lower lip fuller, her teeth beautifully straight and white. Pretty is a good word for the girl in this portrait. A girl who has been told she has a nice smile. Not a glamorous girl but a smart girl, a girl whose look of serious intelligence is not marred by the forties movie star hairdo she has given herself. I had forgotten my mother's brow was so high, that she had such lovely teeth, such a smile. I had forgotten that she usually liked having her picture taken, that she posed easily, sure of herself, smiling straight into the camera, or into the face of someone just beside the camera whom she likes. Even later in her life, after having so many children had caused a vitamin deficiency that destroyed her teeth, she still smiled, but now with her eyes as well, as if there were always something funny being said just as the picture was being taken. Hers is a face I rarely remember not smiling. In another photograph, taken a year or two later, she is deeply happy, still girlish, probably just twenty because I am a baby and she shows no sign of being pregnant with my brother. This is one in a series of snapshots still stapled in the blue folder with the name of the pharmacy imprinted on it; the pictures tell a small story of family life at that time. In the first, she poses with her younger brother, her arm around his waist and his around hers. They stand in the full sun of an early summer afternoon, which throws their short fat shadows off to her left. She is wearing a blouse with a peplum waist, a long light-colored skirt, white socks, loafers. In the next, I am asleep in the shade under a blanket; in the next, her younger sisters pose together, holding the dog's paws so he sits up straight. In the next photo, still standing on the same sidewalk in front of the same tilted telephone pole, my mother hikes up her skirt and shows off her slender legs, laughing into the camera. Then I appear, walking blurred toward the camera with my stuffed elephant in my arms, my mouth open wide. I have probably just woken up from my nap; I am probably crying, since in the last photograph my mother kneels with her arms around me, her dark hair leaning against my baby blondeness, her smiling face just shadowed by the angle of her head. I am no longer crying. In later photos she is rarely without children, still smiling. It seems to me that the occasion of each photograph is a visit, earlier from my grandmother or my aunts, later from my husband and me; in one picture she poses on the back steps, probably in spring, probably afternoon, by of the way the children are huddled together in the bright sun. On her lap is one of my youngest sisters, a squinting blonde baby in a white sweater and hat. Behind her two other sisters and two cousins make grotesque faces for the camera, and my mother, who can't see their grimaces, laughs delightedly at the photographer. One last photograph, a telling one. My mother stands alone in the field beside our house, framed by last year's matted-down hay and raspberry bushes barely leafed out. In the greyed browns of spring her bright blue pantsuit stands out. She holds one elbow in the other hand, her attention diverted from a bare branch she has been inspecting. Her face is pale; she has not thought to put on her usual lipstick. I could not guess from the photograph what her expression means, but I think I know. On the morning of that particular visit, my husband and son and I had arrived to find her just getting home from the hospital, where she had stayed overnight for minor surgery, a D and C. She had not told anyone she was having problems, and had insisted, on our arrival, that she felt fine. Her expression tells me that this is not the case, that either in the bare branch, or in her thoughts, she has seen a hint of her own mortality. She is just fifty years old, two years older than I am as I write this. ~~~~~~~~~~~ To other parts of "Archaeology of a Mother": 1-- 2-- 4-- 5 |
