Photographic Evidence
aka dressing up a scary family
Children who experience childhood trauma train themselves to become hyper observant. It’s a survival technique. You want to be ready when things have a habit of sneaking up on you sideways. We also train ourselves to not notice certain things. It’s probably more accurate to say that we learn to ignore particular words and actions in our lives. We also ignore any emptinesses. In fact all this ignoring ends up wiping many of these things from our conscious brains, sometimes even as they are happening.
Memory is a tricky thing. I used to ask my writing students to write a description of a nonexistent photo from their childhood. Siblings often describe the same family event in completely different ways. We all have our own filters. We remember what we noticed. We noticed what felt safe or what we needed to notice to protect ourselves. It’s not just other people who lie to us. We sometimes lie to ourselves. It might be because we’re not ready, or at least feel as if we’re not ready, to face uncomfortable truths.
Recently I found photographic evidence of something my conscious brain had only been willing to dance around the edges of for the last 47 years. I got married the first time when I was only 19. (Don’t try this at home.) I had a giant Italian wedding with 350 guests, ice carvings, a seafood appetizer table — you get the idea. I would have been happy with cake and champagne after the church service, but this was my mother’s replacement wedding. She and my dad had eloped. We did a lot of things her way. I didn’t mind. Besides, it wasn’t easy to make my mom happy, or to keep her that way.
Most of the people at the wedding were my mother and father’s extended family members and lots and lots of their work friends. Most of my friends and my husband’s were in the wedding party. We had quite a few attendants. My dress was simple. We had picked dresses the bridesmaids could easily wear again. Everything else was fancier. Some of the wedding guests looked more dressed up than I did.
At one point during the reception my mother’s family must have decided that they wanted a family photo. There was a wedding photographer who would have been happy to take the photo but they asked my father to take it instead. This photo resurfaced recently when I moved my mother, who has dementia, to a new residential facility. My mother sits like a queen in the center of the photo. Her two sisters-in-law sit to her left with their husbands, my mother’s brothers, standing behind them. There is a space beside them where my father would have stood had he not been taking the photo. My mother’s mother, the grandmother who abused me for much of my life when she lived with us, sits to my mother’s right. My sister sits beside my grandmother. Next to her is my grandmother’s sister, my great aunt. My aunt’s son stands behind my grandmother next to the space left for my father.
I am not in the photo. I repeat. I am not in the photo. This was my wedding. My grandmother didn’t like me. My mother let her abuse me. Their whole family was dysfunctional but they knew how to stand together. Without me.
I probably would have been extremely angry if I had found this photo before I had done all the work needed to process many of the things that happened to me while I was growing up. I saw the photo numerous times when I was young. It never looked odd to me then. I had learned what not to see. Now I see it clearly. I feel no anger. No resentment. Not even any sadness. What I do feel is a lovely epiphanic I’m-not-crazy feeling with a side order of that feeling you get when you watch a particularly hilarious and poignantly zingy SNL skit that cuts to the core of an unpleasant truth. Perhaps Tolstoy was right that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” but those of us who grew up in an unhappy family know our stories could all be written in the same book.
