the photo albums
It hit me again today how absolutely insane it is that my mother used the excuse of moving away to dump stuff she didn’t wanna take with her into the basement of my place, just to get rid of family photo albums. She pretended and said she’d come back for this stuff to either keep or discard, but never did. It was on me to do that.
When she moved again afterwards, I noticed that while she also couldn’t get rid of some stuff in time for that either, she just threw it out or took it with her anyway. Just proved to me she was too cowardly that time to go “Hey I don’t wanna keep these albums, do you want them?”. She knew it would be awkward to address as a mother why she wanted to get rid of the baby photo album of the only child she ever had.
Because you know what, fine that you don’t wanna keep albums of family members you’re no longer close to because you got divorced, it’s fine to not need the pictures of your past marriage either. But your child? It’s so incredibly weird. Are there never any moments when you wanna pull that out and remember?
She is a mild hoarder. This woman will choose to keep anything over throwing it out. She used to hold on to clothes I discarded as a teen. She’s the one to keep gift wrapping paper after unwrapping a gift so she can reuse it. But she had no problem parting with the only pictures of her only baby.
I never had a chance of having a mother, retrospectively. She just can’t. She knows what’s expected of her and she knows she needs to keep up appearances, but behind closed doors, there’s no one to see, and even the rare good parenting moments felt empty and performative. She did “fake it til you make it” and never made it. She just could never get herself to genuinely love me.
She feels nothing looking at these pictures. Maybe dread. Now that I am an adult, I know that it was post-partum that just never healed or went away until I was about 24. It was all the auto-immune things she refused treatment on. And she denied all financial or therapeutic help all those years out of pride and egoism.