My Mum turned 60 this week, and it suddenly hit me that I only ever think of her in terms of the last 30 years – since I was born. It took me putting together a DVD of images for it to really hit home that she had a life before rearing five children.
As I scanned in hundreds of black and white images of her wrapped in blankets in the arms of old men in trilbies, playing next to the fence of a brownstone terrace in the States, or standing innocently with a Jack Russell terrier, I realised that my Mum was a little girl, just like I had been.
There were photos of her bronzed and sexy in a bikini posing next to a surfboard or sitting proudly on the bonnet of a Holden – Dad’s other love. She had a glamourous look, the way that 1960’s photos always do.
She was beautiful; wrinkles and sun spots were decades away. Her simple and honest self-made clothes made her look like Jackie O and her vibrant smile exuded an energy that leaps from the picture even now, decades later.
This was my Mum at my age. And then she had kids.
Not that the smile isn’t still there and that she can’t surprise you with quirkiness you never believed she had; but she is different. She is my Mum. Not a baby making sandcastles or a fife playing school girl or a carefree teenager. She is my mother and all it encompasses – and it wasn’t really until now that I realised the true sacrifice that motherhood is.
Janette, 33, Paris, France
May 2, 2007 at 5:31 pm
i’ve been interviewing my grandma for a book i want to do about her. she was married to a very abusive man and had four children (she lost twins when he kicked her in the stomach :/)…but, when my parents decided that they were going to give us away, she took my sisters and i in, and rescued us from a horrendous life.
she had only been husbandless for two years, she had lost over 100 pounds, she had an amazing job, was going out, being social, had created this life not based on the needs of others for the first time ever.
and then, she had 3 small children to care for and it was over. i grew up raised by her and thinking of her as ‘my grandma’. only recently have i started to think of her as a woman who lived a life, just like me, before all of that.
and so, i have started interviewing her and it has been amazing…i have talked to her about school, her hobbies, passions, crushes, dreams, about sex, her sexual desires, her marriage, her sex life while married, what it was like to shelf everything and be an abused wife and a mother to so many.
it has been an incredible and eye opening thing, and it makes me see older women in such a different light now. i hope that i don’t forget…
May 2, 2007 at 11:42 pm
About two years ago I went through a year long project I fondly called “Restorations” where I typed in old journals, scanned in old photos, etc. I had a whole section for the few photos I have of my parents before I was born – when they eloped to NY…and there is my mother on the beach in a skimpy dark green bikini…and I remember feeling very similar to what you described.
I’d not thought of her that way. She was more beautiful as a young woman than I thought she’d be…