In a book of picture puzzles from my childhood, there is a spread of photos showing ordinary objects, pictured from unordinary angles—a box of colored pencils viewed from the points of their sharpened tips, a toothbrush viewed from the end of its handle, a sailboat viewed from above. The pencils look like wooden hexagons with colored spots in the middle.
That is how I always viewed my mother—at an odd angle and a little too close. She and other immediate family members are, of all people, most mysterious to me. When asked for Christmas gift ideas for a family member, or what size shoes my kids are wearing, I have no answer. But I have friends for whom I could answer those questions.
Although I find this blindness-by-proximity disconcerting with my kids and spouse, it’s downright terrifying with my parents. The terror is well-hidden, but persistent. I try to see and understand, but the spaces we share feel like an ever-changing environment, without enough information. I can’t quite figure it out sufficiently to relax. This description seems fitting for a violent or abusive environment, but my childhood fits neither of those categories. Rather, I find it unnerving that the people who were my whole environment and by definition my “normal” as a kid, now seem so full of paradox as to be not understood. Proximity can make a mess of things.
In some ways my childhood feels like another life with different people. In other ways it is the riddle whose solution answers all my questions about who I am today. But no matter how much therapy I engage, no matter the journals I fill, no matter the hours spent with my parents, they remain an enigma to me. It’s like I know what they are, but when I look at them, what I know and what I’m seeing are mismatched overlays. This leads to mild feelings of insanity.
I assumed this insanity was permanent, until my mother died. As I wrote her obituary, looked at photos, and listened to family and friends share memories, a clear picture took form, captured from the correct angle. The proportions are true, there is color and detail, and I’m not sure I could describe her to someone, but I am beginning to imagine I could.
The stories accomplish most of this astonishing work. A month after my mother passed, we facilitated a memorial service on Zoom, for the people from different seasons of my mom’s life who live far and wide. My mom’s siblings and friends and coworkers told stories, and each one added texture and color, shape and shadow and light. I found after the memorial that I held a more complete picture of my mother for the very first time. I felt I could hang it on the refrigerator with a magnet, or put it in a memory book or show it to friends.
The picture I had before was scarcely more than one cheekbone and a jawline, recognizable primarily by what was missing. I still have that picture, its edges worried after more than 20 years of frequent handling. I will keep it to honor those years of not-knowing.
Three weeks after the Zoom service, my dad and sister and I, with the kind help of a pastor friend, facilitated an in-person memorial service, and again people shared memories—the neighbor she walked with in the mornings, who now has bird-feeders and birdhouses because my mom “made her a birdie”; the coworker she had fun parties with when their students were on vacation; the young nephews she helped to weave baskets; and the coworker at a Seventh-Day Adventist boarding school for whom my mom procured beer from our neighbor for the teacher’s science experiment.
“That’s me!” I whispered to my husband after the story about the beer. To fully appreciate the beer story, you must understand that staff employed at SDA institutions—like my mother—can get their wrists slapped, or employment terminated, for purchasing alcohol. But my mother, unconcerned about handling alcohol (despite the fact that to my knowledge she never tasted so much as a drop), asked our neighbor for a can of beer and brought it to school for her coworker.
Beneath my mother’s conservative lifestyle was a “try me” demeanor, ready to rise to socially unacceptable challenges, or do things many would opt out of. I see that in myself, and as I make the connection with my mom, I again am surprised that my vision has cleared so noticeably after my mother’s death. How did I not see her and me overlapping before? How did I not see that my jump off a 40-foot structure in the middle of the river without a second thought, or walking with total ease into the state penitentiary as a volunteer, were akin to her trying out my cousins’ rollerblades, on a hill, when she was forty years old (bruises ensued), or picking up a hitchhiking woman and then organizing a baby shower for her?
It’s been said that what humans want most is to be seen. We want witnesses to our life. I’m not sure if my mother saw me. Certainly she was a witness to my life, and knew things about me that I still don’t know about myself. But when she looked at me, I couldn’t tell if she saw me. It seemed she always filtered me somehow, through what she thought I was, or thought I should be, often missing who I actually am. Was her perspective also too up-close-and-personal for clear focus or a complete picture?
If a mother cannot see her child, can she allow that privilege for others in her child’s life—allow aunties and friends and bosses to see more than she? Of course, now I am thinking of myself as a mother, and my own children, the way they, too, seem partial and out of focus. With such fierce desire it hurts, I want my children to be seen, want loving witnesses for their life. But it may not be me who sees them best. My witness, my angle, has its benefits and drawbacks, and I don’t imagine I will see my children with the simplicity allowed to those who become acquainted with them in normal ways. After all, I knew them first in my belly, an introduction altogether different than meeting someone at the desk beside yours in school, or on the playground, or at lunch or work or coffee shops or church.
I realize that some children have connection with their parents that is clear and true and intimate. Not everyone is blindly grasping like me. But here I am. What is here for me in this awareness of mother-blindness? Perhaps this discovery is an invitation to a moment of surrender. I release my mother from any requirement to have seen me better. I release myself from the nagging guilt that I ought to understand best those who are closest to me. And I release my children to be seen by others, better than by me. I am a witness, an ally, a source of history and recipes and inside jokes. But I may be seeing the sailboat from above and entirely miss that it has a towering mast.
If my love is indeed riddled with gaping blind spots, I have newfound gratitude for the eyes-open love from others for my family—parents and sister, husband and kids. And I have newfound grace for my proximate blindness. I cannot—nor do I want to—create distance for the sake of clarity. So I will settle for a skewed view, trusting that my immediate family members will ultimately see themselves through the eyes of many, all with different perspectives, and through the eyes of God, the only character in this story without blind spots.
Blind though I may be, you’ll find me here, watching and listening, soaking in the narrative that is mine, cherishing the pictures that are mine alone. Even blindness does not deter a mother.
