The Lens:
Everything in this blog is my own work . . . with the exception of the above picture. It is of mother and is my favorite picture of her.
There is another picture of her in the same dress, shoes and handbag in front of the Statue of Liberty. So, I am guessing, in this picture, she is on the Statue of Liberty ferry. I am also guessing she would have been in her early twenties. She had enlisted in the WAVES in WWII and was shipped to New York for Basic Training.
My mom rarely talked about her time in the Navy. I don’t know why. My best guess was she was a bit self-conscious about her age. To talk about her time in the service would be to give a pretty good indication of her age.
But, I digress.
Back to the picture.
I don’t think Mom every appreciated her beauty. In her day, as a woman, you were either pretty or smart. You couldn’t be both. Mom was undeniably smart.
There is so much beauty in this picture. Her dress, her relaxed pose, her hair blowing in the wind, her faraway expression. I wonder if, when she would look at this picture, she saw what I see, if she could see how beautiful she was.
It is a bit ironic for me to wish my mom could see her beauty. I, myself, have a bit of a complicated relationship with beauty. We all possess beauty. The problem is we put such a narrow definition on beauty, especially for women. It is all about our faces and figures.
Yes, faces and figures can be beautiful. But, that is only one, very limited scope of beauty.
The emphasize on the need for women to be beautiful is problematic. I don’t see this, in and of itself, as a problem. The problems come in two things. The need to be beautiful only applies to women, not to all people. The second is that we rate beauty in the narrow confines of faces and figures.
We miss so much beauty because we are so blindly fixated on the most obvious forms of beauty. It is kind of a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees – we can’t see true beauty because we are only looking for it in faces and figures.
The Refraction:
Fairly recently, my husband made a comment about the photo, something I had never thought about.
Who took the picture?
That was a very intriguing question.
Who took the picture?
In my “How Do I Love Thee” post, I talk about our fixation with celebrities, that we think we know these people but we don’t.
With that one question – “Who took the picture?” – I thought about all of the ways I didn’t know my mother. One might think they know/knew their parents. But, do we really know them? I only knew my mom (and dad) through monocular vision (using a small monocular at that).
A few months before she died, I embarked on a mission to talk to her about her life. She had seen so much. To give you an idea, there was no television when she was a child. Think of how much our world has changed since the advent of television.
I only had two conversations with her about her life before she somewhat suddenly passed away.
So, I was left with accumulating what information I could about her on my own. My sources were very limited, but broader than I considered.
Fortunately, I had asked Mom quite some time before she died to start writing her memories – a bit of a memoir. When we were going through her belongings, I found she had complied.
Some of her writings were memories of events, like a trip to the dump with my dad and their dog. Others were more insightful and enlightening, like a reflection on her “animus” or being a tom-boy. I hadn’t known she had considered herself a tom-boy.
I also Googled her at one point. I found out she had been a member of the Women’s Council of Realtors, serving in leadership positions. I was likely in high school at the time she belonged to this group. I had no idea Mom was a member of this organization, let alone an elected official.
In the last year or so, I joined newspapers.com as part of my genealogy research. When I was a child, my parents would take us to events at Old St. Mary’s Church. I have very fond memories of the Christmas parties in the church’s lower hall. What I didn’t know was the group organizing the party was originally started as a singles club. I found through newspaper clippings, the group was originally governed by an appointed Board of Directors. When they changed to an elected board, Mom was the first elected Vice President. I also learned Mom was the director of their first Christmas Party.
Interesting tidbits. And in the big scheme of things, what I have found are tidbits. What, if any, other organizations was she involved with? Did she hold other leadership roles? Were there other events/groups where she was a founding party?
I thought I knew my mom, and I probably do, to a degree. There was just so much more depth to her than I had known.
Like – who took that picture? The more I contemplate the photo, the more my mind wanders. Her manner of dress, the makeup, suggests to me she was on a date. So, was this someone she was seeing or just a one-off. Was he in the Navy like she was? Mom was training to be a flight instructor. So, would he have been a pilot? Did he ask her to pose for the photo? Did he also have a copy of the picture? Is there some family out there wondering who is this woman and why does their father have a picture of her? What ever happened to him?
These are questions no amount of research will ever answer. The saddest part of all of this is the answers were there. I had a chance to get them. All I had to do was open a conversation. Maybe Mom wouldn’t have answered my questions, but maybe she would have. It is too late to ask now.
I recently said to my husband, every moment of our lives we make a choice as to how to spend our time. I had all sorts of time to talk with my mom and never made the choice to really talk to her until the end of her life. And, now, simply for the failure to ask, all of that history is buried with her.