This photo was taken when I was 3-years-old and is the only photo I have of my parents and me together. I guess we weren’t big on family togetherness and having our photo taken together on a regular basis!
These rare photos mean a great deal to me since I have so few of them from my childhood. My mother was extremely possessive of the photos she had in her ownership. When I was around 20, I took a couple dozen negatives from some of my favorite baby and early childhood photos and had copies made for myself. My mother was nervous about me having those negatives, even though I promptly returned them! At least I have those couple dozen photos now from that era in my life.
Everything else now is gone. My mother wouldn’t let me have the photo album or any other keepsakes from my childhood — my favorite stuffed animal, my grade school report cards, my pictures with Santa, my baby book — until she died.
She had severe emotional problems and issues with alcohol abuse, and her mental and physical health was in a severe decline in 1979. My husband and I had stopped in Ohio on our way back from West Virginia from seeing my father who had had a heart attack and was hospitalized at the VA Hospital in Clarksburg. I sat in the living room of the house I grew up in with that old photo album on my lap, the album that contained all my baby pictures, my birthday party photos, photos of young classmates, Christmases, vacations. I was very concerned about what I was witnessing of my mother’s life: her declining health, her abusive relationship with the man who had been her husband for 10 months but wouldn’t move out, the constant drinking. I wanted to save those tangible memories of my childhood and even said to my husband, “I should hand this album to you right now, and you go out the front door with it while they’re in the kitchen and put it in the trunk of the car. Then it’ll be out of here.” I was afraid, though, that my mom would suspect what I was up to and catch me in the act of “stealing” her belongings. I didn’t want the confrontation and left the album behind when we left there to head on home to Minnesota.
Several weeks later, my father died. A mere month after that, my mother went into a completely disoriented state where she didn’t know where she was, who the people were around her, what year it was. She was in her own hazy reality that consisted mostly of memories of the past. She was only 60 years old, but she had to be hospitalized. When some months went by and there was no improvement, her house was sold.
Now, at this time, I was 24 years old, in college full time for the first time in my life, and had a part time job. I lived 800 miles away from where all the activity was taking place with my mother. I was also emotionally exhausted from having been through the death of my father who was the closest person in the world to me for so many years and dealing with the ongoing anger and pain of the abuse that went on in my childhood of living with an alcoholic mother. I really didn’t want the responsibility at that time of tending to all the official matters of her commitment, the sale of the house, and the dispersement of the household items. I put it in my uncle’s hands, my mother’s only living sibling then.
As a consequence, everything disappeared. Yes, I told my uncle that I wasn’t interested in any profit from the house or the furnishings. However, never in my wildest imagination did I assume that all the personal items — like photos, keepsakes, my baby book, report cards, etc. — would vanish. I imagined that someone would oversee the dispersal of the household items and set aside those items clearly of a personal nature. There wasn’t that much there that someone couldn’t have hung on to those things and asked me if I wanted them.
But everything disappeared. I have those couple of dozen photos I had copies made of, and occasionally a relative will turn up a couple photos that they send to me. I treasure those photos.
Posted in Family of Origin, alcoholism, dysfunctional families | Tags: family, old photos, keepsakes
