La la la la la la la la . . . all of it was made for you and me.

I am the passenger
and I ride and I ride
I ride through the city’s backsides
I see the stars come out of the sky
Yeah, they’re bright in a hollow sky
You know, it looks so good tonight.
                                      – Iggy Pop & Ricky Gardiner

I am of the opinion that even when life is at its shittiest, it is also beautiful and full of moments that demand our attention, that remind us of all the love around us. Even when everything seems to be at ends, falling apart, maybe disintegrating right in front of you, when you are least sure of anything in your life – if you’ve done things right, if you’ve loved the people around you and not severed all ties, then there is so much around you to be grateful for, so many lovely moments to look at, to be conscious of as they happen.  It is definitely this belief, more than anything else, that has kept me from sliding down that deep slope of sadness that certain times of my life have seemed to push me toward. The people in my life (some gone, some still here, some destined to be in and out of my life over and over) are amazing, caring, loving, hilarious and masterful distractors as well as patient and compassionate listeners.

I have been overwhelmed lately, over and over, by the luck I have in amassing this motley bunch of people around me.  Sometimes it feels like no matter where I turn there is someone who makes my life better – like I have spokes shooting out from all around me connecting me to a large circle of fun and joy and love that is spinning around us all, rotating and turning and turning and turning whether we notice it there or not. It is always the small moments that remind me of this – an unexpected laugh in the middle of a tense moment, a joke shared, a small toast among friends or the head shaking of a friend who can’t believe you will still do that, the undeserved joy of a nephew’s smile for no other reason than you appeared right in front of him.  Here are a few of the recent moments that make me grateful for my people, my family (by blood or by heart) – who bring me joy and break the fall when the world slides out from under me. A series of brief odes to these great folks, big and small.

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Seeing my nephews’ faces peer through the wavy glass of their entry way – their toes stretched to raise their faces high enough to see – and then my name (missing a syllable, vowels shoved together with love) loud and animated as their front door swings open.  Their arms around me, one set around my waist, one set around my legs, making it hard for me to walk.  Having to tell them to wait while I hug the rest of the family.  Sitting on the floor to watch the end of a movie with them, B sprawled out in front of me on his belly while I hold his ankles and wiggle his legs around.  His giggle.  The look backward when I stop and the scoot, scoot back so his feet are resting on my leg, skin to skin, heaven. Filling my plate with homemade tri-tip and pilaf, knowing that the whole family was waiting there for me, post-work, surely tired, but ready for a late dinner and the chaos of three or four conversations going all at once, intertwining and overlapping and loud.

Picking up B and taking him to pick up N from Kindergarten.  Hearing N yell, there’s my auntie as we walk up, hand in hand.  Ice cream with my boys, their faces a horrid mess, N slamming his cup up into his face and reeling backward with laughter. Dancing spastically in the car, N slowing his moves to a slow robot to make me laugh. Spending the afternoon with my brother and his wife.  Holding little N while we all talk about big stuff and little stuff.  Knowing this will happen more and more often as the miles between us shrink.

An evening spent with an old friend, her son and my dogs.  Seeing her son bounce around the house, excited to see me even though I am so new to him, looking at his contagious smile – so wide and energetic.  Watching old videos we haven’t seen in fifteen years (if ever at all) and remembering that then, like now, was beautiful and awful and hysterical in almost all senses of that word. Talking and talking until you realize it’s almost five in the morning, like we are not almost forty, but maybe almost twenty, all things so much like they ever were despite ages and ages of life happening for each of us during the lost years of our friendship.  Feeling content, knowing that some people just are your friends, for no good reason, for no thing you’ve done, maybe just because the universe keeps you connected and you can fuck it up, but you can keep making it work, too.

Starting a roller derby class with a far more fierce friend who  may actually join a team someday.  Falling and lagging and trying and trying until we are so sore even talking seems to hurt.  Being aware amidst all the pain that these are moments we will always be able to laugh about, to relive, time spent together before we live so far apart, before it gets even harder to find time together.  Her split chin and my sweaty, sweaty face.  Our energized voices talking rapidly as we exit, the messages back and forth the next week about the pain, the pain, ohmygawd the pain. Joking about the teacher and her topless rollerskating banjo playing dreams.  Stories we could not have made up but will retell over and over.

Watching N miss a soccer goal because he sees me walk up and he waves, a smile spreading across his face and even though his dad and his coach tell him to watch the ball, he watches me.  Knowing I should feel a little bad about that, but only feeling the love, the certainty that what I am doing with my life is right, right there in that wide grin.  Kicking a soccer ball on the edge of the field with B, the sound of his giggle, both deep and high pitched all at once, when he kicks it at me and I miss it. Getting to go to the pumpkin patch with everyone, watching B fearlessly climb up the bounce slide steps – slipping more than once the first time, but never hesitating, just going and going and pushing forward – his bravado even at such a young age so inspiring.  Watching him adjust his second climb up to avoid any slips, seeing the little boy who chickened out watch him and then make it up himself, with N cheering them both on from above. Their stretched out, laughing, smiling faces flying down the slide.

A happy hour event with one of my closest friends, refusing to miss her even though soon we will not live in the same city, or even the same state.  Commiserating over work and bosses and other friends. Laughing at each other that we need pictures of our drinks before we can drink them, admiring her skills at staging the photograph and enjoying even that lag in time between getting the drink and drinking it. Losing track of time, the windows darkening and a candle lit while we talk over the arm that reaches in, ignoring the insanely loud atmosphere of the bar to tell stories and make plans and relax in a small pocket of time set aside for nothing else but hanging out, nothing else but this.

An insane evening on a school bus with this friend and her husband, meeting another friend of theirs for the first time, wearing plastic viking hats and clip-on mustaches and laughing until my eyelids hurt.  Knowing that there’s nowhere else I would rather be in that moment and with no one else.  Dancing and shit-talking and trying to think through the fun to come up with trivia answers.  Wowing them with the speed and efficiency I can create a Snookie bump, without a mirror, without a brush, on a moving bus at midnight – such skills to impress them with.  Seeing the startled shock on their faces when I quickly stand up at one bar, take off my shoes and threaten to beat them all with my shoes after being called a killjoy. Falling into such deep, hysterical laughter by the end of the night that I can’t do anything but form short sentences.  Causing one friend to repeatedly fall apart with just one simple gesture acted out over and over.  It never getting old, for either of us.

Deciding to attend a concert, at the last minute, with friends who used to be employees, but from the beginning were much more than that.  Feeling giddy from the moment they get in the car, knowing that dorking out is always the goal, but so is catching up and talking about the real stuff.  Talking so fast, over each other, because we all have so much to say and never enough time.  Shared glances that require no words when we see way too many pairs of shiny spandex leggings and braided headbands worn across the forehead.  The facial-expression-shorthand of women who had to communicate about customers without saying a word.  Plotting with the only other women in the world, that I know, who are excited about dressing up like Chuck Finley in all of his 70’s mustached glory.  Feeling alive and independent and capable of creating this whole new life I have set up for myself to invent.

Making a rollerskating date with a college friend who has always been there, to pick me up or help me through, and then unexpectedly finding a few extra hours to meet for breakfast the day before we were to skate.  Lounging through breakfast, talking and talking about roller derby and writing and family without feeling time rushing by, without feeling like I need to run off to the next place.  Commiserating over being almost forty and entertaining the notion of roller derby, of realizing that we are not old, neither of us, and we will not act old. Enjoying eggs and potatoes and coffee and the company that feels so easy and comfortable and peaceful.

An unexpected visit, a short amount of stolen hours with someone I didn’t expect to see anytime soon.  Relishing the time trapped between two days, trapped between being with and being without, knowing that soon I will not see this person very much if at all and refusing to be sad about that in the moment.  Both of us laughing at my dog chasing her own tail, startled by her own butt, spinning and spinning and spinning.  Both of us enamored of my littlest dog, her fraggle face and monkey belly, her wide eyes lit up and her ears back. Locking out the sadness that will come from missing this person even the next day to just be there, laughing and smiling and submerged in the minutes that are passing, refusing to be sad before it is time, refusing to think too much about that right then. Allowing myself these moments when they happen, without reserve and without overthinking.

Photo by Cesy Mitchell

An elaborate performance by N and I while visiting my sister at her ‘camp’, where she is ‘camping’ for a very long time.  A ridiculously costumed, unrehearsed free-style rap performance to brighten my sister’s birthday. Helping N into the costume in my sister’s room as he can hardly talk for the giggling.  Blowing up the inflatable ring for his Rap is Phat rapper costume.  His pursed lip smile, when he tries not to smile, his dimples coming out full force when he does this.  This dimpled, pursed lip face as we walk out of her room and down to where the family is barbecuing. The instant change in his stature as he approaches them, the character taking over his body, a swagger falling into step.  My heart swelling when some strangers walk by and look, but he keeps on rapping, keeps on beatboxxing, keeps on dorking out.  His hug and B’s hug when I have to say goodbye only a couple of hours later.  That was awesome, Dann-a, as we wave goodbye. My sister’s smile in the middle of all this other stuff. Wrapping my arms around her because I can.  Holding her that extra minute – so grateful for her and my brother, my left and right side, the family that is meant to last with you into old age

Spending an evening out with other friends, celebrating a birthday, so much laughing that my voice begins to give. Friends who know me as the girl who will do almost anything for a laugh, without fear of looking the fool, who don’t seem at all surprised that I still act like this at almost forty, even with a camera toting friend in tow, even in the age of Facebook and instant mass humiliation (but you have to be embarrassed to be humiliated, right?).  Who don’t seem at all surprised when I climb on a dumpster or pull wigs out of my trunk or climb on top of my car. Who know I’m not drunk, know that I don’t need to be drunk to do these things.  I only need an opportunity and an audience.  I only need to know you will laugh – and that so will I.

Photo by Jennifer Majarian

Driving home way too late, way past when I should have been too tired to function but was propelled forward by the rare moment in time of us all together.  Driving home and consciously aware (for what might be the hundredth time in the last few months) that I am a lucky, lucky girl to know so many people who know me, really know me, and still they love me.  Still they join in and participate and revel in the hours we can find to be together.  Who will also be there when I need them, show up for the shit, too, be there to hand me a tissue to dry my eyes or open their doors even if I am carrying a suitcase and a devastated look. Countless faces and eyes and arms to hug me, to push me into a silly situation, to smile at me and make me laugh even when, especially when, there seems little to laugh at.  Amazement at finding myself standing here, in the middle of this circle, of people who don’t even all know each other, but still circle around me, magically present, appreciated and so valuable, so needed and so loved. They are all certainly my bright in a hollow sky and they all look so good to me tonight, and every night.

Stand-In Mother: a big sister’s prayer for calm

I am a big sister.  I have a brother and a sister who are six and eight years younger than me, respectively.  I am not a mother.  I have no children of my own, both by choice and by lack of actually choosing to make it happen.  I did not raise my brother and sister (my parents were parents – present and providing), but I spent enough time babysitting, watching, tutoring, corralling and loving my siblings to feel almost as much mother as sister.  We always had the most delicate of hybrid relationships – they could tell me more than they would our parents, but not the things I would deem scary or dangerous enough to feel like I had to tell Mom or Dad. I was old enough to sense and recognize true danger, but young enough to let it slide up until it got too close to my ever-shifting threshold.

My mother often told me, growing up and after, that the gap in our ages was large enough for me to be considered an only child in respect to the personality traits associated with birth order. My mother is intelligent and has read a lot – she was right about a lot of things I doubted when I was younger – but I still think she was all wrong about that. I did spend my early years playing solo games of make-believe.  I learned not only to entertain myself, but to create whole worlds and scenarios to keep my latch-key mind busy for those twilight hours between school and the return of my mother from work and the little ones from daycare.  I was also the daughter of a teenage mother and so I ate with a fork before anyone else in the family thought it was safe and at three and four years old, I made my own cereal on Saturday mornings with a bowl and box left out on the counter where I could reach and a cup of  milk sitting separate from the jug on a child’s height shelf of the fridge. I have a self-sufficiency and independence that is very only-child-like.  I can take care of myself.  I can entertain myself.  I can make do. I am not scared of spending time alone – of keeping myself company.

But I am as much a big sister – and even what I might call a mother/sister – as I am my own person.  I have felt protective of and maternal toward those two since I can remember.  I was thrilled to change diapers and feed them and gently hold my brother in my first grade arms as I strained to be far enough up on my tippy-toes to set him back in his crib under the watchful but trusting gaze of my mother. I wanted to help with them always – and even when I would almost cry from nights they would bicker and keep me from falling asleep or times I literally had to chase them around the house to make them mind me when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen – even then, I loved them fiercely and kept invisible arms around them.

I moved away from home at nineteen and what caused me the most pain was living apart from them during those crucial teenage years. Missing out on seeing them morph and change before my eyes into the adults they would become.  I still mourn, sometimes, those years that my family was four instead of five.  I was more than ready to leave.  It was time for me to be on my own.  I needed to know who I was besides daughter.  But I also felt like an island drifting away from the continent of my family.  Odd woman – out. They went on growing up and growing and changing.  I kept on loving them, but they felt far away from me – like they were paper dolls I used to dress up and set on my dresser to admire.  I still see pictures of them as children – at four and six or six and eight or eight and ten – and can’t believe that those children are gone.

They have each become caring, funny and smart people.  They have each, as we all have, struggled with different battles in their lives.  They each amaze me with their love and compassion and willingness to join proverbial hands even after times of great silence between us.  Just knowing they exist and are within reach keeps me anchored in my most difficult moments. They each can make me laugh unexpectedly and with abandon at the most trying of times. The love is always there.  I never doubt it – mine or theirs.

They, too, carry (in their own distinct ways) the burden of what our family has become – this fractured, trunk-split, drooping tree that none of us imagined even five years ago. We each wear it differently – each have distinct ways of managing the truth of what we have become. It is the weight of my sister’s pain, though, I have more and more recently felt like a string of fishing weights around my neck, constant and jingling and only heavy enough to make everything a little more difficult, but not quite impossible. My brother has his boys – an additional concern when it comes to my mother’s bouts of aggression and venomous attack – but also, (I imagine) a comfort and a kind of beauty that can help his thoughts drift and refocus. And he has his wife – a woman of kindness and humor whose smile must be an oasis among the chaos that sometimes envelops us all.

My sister is – like me – without these ever-present family anchors.  She, also, is the closest to my mother and always has been.  She is the youngest – the baby.  She and my mother veer more toward friends than my brother or I will ever even approach with my mother. I don’t begrudge her this or resent it – it is what it is and it is the way of families. This makes my sister uniquely poised to reach my mother at times when no one else can, to reach out and be let in –  but it also gives her a propulsion to stay close when maybe she should not, when it might be best for her to distance herself.  But none of us can say for the others when to slam the door and when to open it, even if only ajar.  We remain silent on that matter except to give each other permission to stay as close or as far as away as necessary in the craziest of times.

So I worry.  About my sister and her heart.  About my sister and her stress and worry and anxiety.  About my sister and her addictions.  I know I can not save her.  I know that I will not save her.  But still I worry and worry and worry when I see her teetering, when I feel the shake in her voice, the loneliness in her eyes and the fatigue in her hug.  I worry when she splits from her boyfriend right before my mother becomes the neediest, right when my sister is the only one my mother will allow in without bitter biting back.  The worry sits with me even though I can’t change the situation.  None of us can.

Last weekend, my sister and the sliding slope of abstaining from abstaining crashed into the wall of too many pills and a week of no sleep and finally the fear reached a peak that forced her to cry for help, literally sobbing through the words she felt compelled to push out of her mouth.  The frightened, screeching, teary call was both a shock and an expected appointment – with the inevitability of the last two years of bravado, with the thumbing her nose at her demons, with her unwillingness to accept the harsh reality of how to survive. Her (understandable) dance with what she called moderation (what she so desperately wants to be possible) but what we all knew was the hand over fist over hand game of when will it be enough.  I hoped I would be wrong.  But I knew I probably wasn’t. When my sister is not sober, we have a very precarious relationship.  She knows I don’t approve.  I know I can’t control her.  Return phone calls take longer to get to me.  Whole topics and events are skipped over.  She doesn’t keep telling me that she can do whatever she wants and she’s fine and I don’t keep telling her that she knows what this is and what it will become and so she should stop.  All of those words are there – every time we talk, every time we see each other.

When the call is made, though, the subtext falls away.  The family – whoever is closest at hand, whoever she feels safest reaching out to, whoever can get to her the fastest – leaps into action and while not knowing what to do or how to do it, sets out to do it.  Our father kept her safe and flushed all of the various pills and meticulously wrote a list for the doctors. My aunt stood watch when he had to leave her to find out where to take her, who to trust with her life and her heart and her sanity.  From afar, from 750 endless miles away, I waited for everyone else to take charge, to hug her and hold her and assure her that she can do this again.  She can do this. Again.  We know more this time – we have learned so much since those days in Anaheim and the limb-numbing fear of her emaciated body and blank eyes.  We have learned so much since my mother’s first mania.  Mostly, thankfully, we have learned how to mobilize – quickly, efficiently and in tandem.  We know crisis.  We know who to turn to, who to call – and if we don’t, we know who to call to find that out.

By Monday night, my sister was safely checked into a long-term facility near Santa Cruz – my father fighting through exhaustion and the kind of fear I can only imagine (because mother/sister is not mother or father, not in the biologically fierce way of DNA split and shared) – he fought that fear and all the tears to drive her as fast and as safely as he could to a place where they can help.  I spoke to her only briefly right before the family left her there – to call her a dork, to tell her I love her, to tell her she is strong, to tell her she is not crazy, to try so desperately to hold her tight even though I could not.  I am not her mother – but I am.  I am her second mother, her shadow mother, her stand-in mother who is there, always, even when our mother can not be (might want to be, might need to be, but can not).  I prod her and push her and annoy her and nag her and love her and trust in her and believe in her as any mother can.  I did not birth her and I did not raise her but I was raised beside her, stood taller next to her as she grew – helped her tie her shoes and fed her pancakes in funny shapes and taught her how to braid hair and let her into my college (drop-out) circle of ridiculousness like she was one of us- young and bold and lovely.

I can not see her for at least the next thirty days and she will, thankfully, be in this facility for at least ninety days – maybe for six months.  Thirty days was the entire span of her first rehab and even with family weekends and phone calls, it seemed an eternity. To not be able to reassure her, to hug her, to cry with her and make her laugh for all of that time sounds impossible right now.  But 90 or 180 days, of course, is no time at all to be without if we will have her after that. If we will fully have her.  If she will be purged of even one small demon, one small trigger, one small doubt about herself and her worth and her future.

I wish this for her: that she will know that, yes, we have been fucked in the lottery of life (in the megabucks of family cohesion and togetherness we have come up short) but we have also been blessed (with more than can even be named, more than we can know even now).  That she will know the things I admire in her: her directness, her willingness to help, her fierce protectiveness of those she loves, her ability to cut right through the shit and name it, her innate intelligence and unselfconscious willingness to ask about what she does not know or understand, her way of calling people on their shit in a manner that disarms instead of rankles.  I wish for her the ability to face the shit storms she has already survived and to grow up.  For real this time.  Without drugs.  Without being drunk.  The growing up that hurts, at first, when you have to really look at who you are and, even more painfully, who you have been.

I pray, to whatever and whoever will listen – to whatever and whoever can make a difference – to no one at all but myself if that’s the case. I pray that she finds the courage to pull at herself until it hurts.  To feel that.  I wish for her that she can see the joy in that, too – the reward that comes later. The grounding that comes with figuring out who you have been and trying to always see who you are becoming.  I repeat over and over my wish for her to have even a small amount of calm, even if only fleeting, with the faith that fleeting calm returns if you know how to feel it.  And returns and returns.  If you can find it once, you can find it again and it can find you, like an imprint that circles back to you.

Until I can see her, until I can hold her with my arms and my whole self – I wish her rest and safety.  I wish for her to feel us around her – father, brother, aunt, sister/mother, nephews. To feel the weathered love and faith and trust – that things will get better, that even when they are shit, she can handle it.  The faith that we all are just hanging on and that our fingernails are strong and capable of gripping even the smallest of crags, the pads of our fingers can find even the faintest of lips on a canyon wall the width and height of Texas and can hold.  For a long, long time if necessary.  I pray she’ll take the space and the time to shut it all out and to take it all in at the same time.  Listen.  Hurt.  Feel.  Know that we will all be here.  And even when we are not, we are. Sister, mother/sister, friend – I love you in all these ways and I will be here, every time, again and again and again.

Tales of an On-Again/Off-Again Motherless Child, vol.1: A Story Told Out of Order

My adult years have been marked by blocks of time in which I have parents in my life and blocks of time where I do not. I made it through adolescence by the sheer will of my parents and my own fear of truly losing control.  I had friends who did not make it through and I have gratitude for the actions of my parents (even the ones that could have, from my perspective, been more loving, more mindful) that kept me safe and even for the ways they sometimes straight-jacketed me (metaphorically, of course) into behaving.  Our road was tangled and tricky (as I think all child-parent roads are).

In early adulthood I fell in love with a woman and faced what had been, until then, a conversation never even imagined by me. For five years, I struggled with respecting the time it might take my parents to ‘come around’ and the distance from animosity necessary to live my own life.  In this time, I saw my parents a handful of times and always it was contentious, always on the edge of yelling, the shadow of my body halfway out the door, the shadow of my mother’s hand reaching to slam the door shut behind me, the roadwork of tears being paved across my face even before they would come.

Since then, my mother and father and I found a place to meet, a place aided by the early death of a childhood friend of my sibling, by the fear of the absence stretching on and on and on until reconciliation was one-sided and prayerful.  My thirties began as a time of true unity in my family — what now feels like one of those summer vacations I remember from novels and coming-of-age movies — the whole family at a beach cottage, children running in and out, sandy toes and salty skin, mothers sipping tea in a lounger on the porch, fathers tossing balls for the dogs to fetch, laughing and lemonade and endless sunshine.  In a word: unsustainable.

 In the years since then, my family has fractured and healed in the jagged, rough way of unset bones.  We look, to my eyes, like a repeatedly broken nose: weathered, bumpy and lovely in the way of scarred things. We function, mostly, and love, always love, each other.  But I am again a motherless child.  She is alive, thankfully (although some days that feels like a very fine distinction), but she is lost to me.  My mother is deep in the sea of the second mania of her life, both taking stage in her 50s, and the woman I knew, stubborn and smart and difficult and funny, is tangled up in, encased by, a reality suspended somewhere below the surface of the one I know.  I am an On-Again Motherless Child.

Details come to me from far away — I am the semi-lost child, the one who moved away — and I try to contain the details there, the horrible specifics of manic. I hold them away from me and squint, try to focus and un-focus all at once — all while trying to be part of the family, there for my father, my siblings, my aunt. The knowledge always present for me that I am not living it the way they are, that I am safe from so many of the images that play on the back of your eyelids as you try to find sleep.  The newest details include a home full of rotting garbage and police cars out front, lights splashing red and blue across the park-like front yard.  Drug dealers and squatters  — although I struggle with the correct term — are you squatting if you are invited?  If the doors are always unlocked and the-more-the-merrier resembles the drug dens of gritty police dramas more than the jolly family gatherings of made-for-TV movies? 

It is an odd place of limbo here in this (almost) motherless place.  She exists.  Somewhere.  She may or may not return.  As of the moment that I write this (as far as I know) her heart is still pumping blood and her mind is racing – so nerves are firing, currents are moving, muscles follow brain follow need.  To those of you who have, through the finality of death, lost a parent, lost both parents, lost all three or four — I know this is not the same and I will not say it is anywhere near worse.  I am painfully and tortuously aware that I can choose to be in the same physical space, but this would mean (in addition to being berated and yelled at and accused of not loving) replacing the concrete images I have accumulated over a lifetime of my mother with the physical body that exists now – with the eyes that seem somehow spun and tilted at a completely different angle, with the wasted-away body of a woman who cannot stop long enough to eat, who is self-medicating in the most dangerous of ways, with the constantly moving body, much like a hummingbird: vibrating in place, humming and hissing.  This I can choose and it is, however painful, better than not having the choice.

And I know I should be grateful that there is still a chance for the Off-Again, to be Mother-Full, for the lovely plateau of between – between episodes, between angers, between absences. But gratitude is a word that feels too heavy, too plump and ripe, too full of the blessings and bounties for me to carry it.  I can’t get there right now. There is no room to juggle it with all of this and the joy that I foster and nurture everyday, for the things and people I gather around me, the amassing of actions and thoughts that allow for happiness, the toe stretching act of balance. For now, it is all I can do to own the word hope, to cradle it, as threadbare and dangerously transparent as even that word feels now.  I will hold hope in the palm of my hand and resist the urge to turn it over and over, to smother it, to wear off the finish, to look so close that it is invisible to me – a thin, beautiful pane.

Memory Keeper as Daughter: A Valentine

On Valentine’s Day, I spent a few hours transferring photos out of the decaying photo album from my parent’s wedding into a newer album so that they can be enjoyed without pictures falling out every time you move the album. I didn’t intend to do this on Valentine’s day. My sweetie and I spent the morning and afternoon together and were planning on having homemade chocolate fondue for dinner (so healthy), but in those lazy, late afternoon hours, I found myself reaching for the album and all of the supplies to transfer the pictures. The avocado green album from 1978 has been tucked into a corner of my house for five years now . . . since I brought it home from a family trip that was meant to celebrate my mother’s 50th birthday but devolved into the kind of family crisis that etches itself into your personal timeline – a raised tab in the files of your life.

I had planned a handmade book to celebrate my mother’s first fifty years and so my father – or, for the sake of full disclosure, my stepfather – secreted a trunk full of old photographs into the back of his truck before we all met up in Anaheim for a family weekend at Disneyland. My sister and I spent hours in our motel room rummaging through the photographs and hand-picking any we thought had to be included in the book. We found baby pictures – those soft-hued, correctively hand painted, bright eyed, posed photos of the 1950s. We found teen pictures and prom pictures – the prom dress, we knew from the often retold story, that her grandmother, Nanny, had burned with the iron on the day of the prom, as my mother had insisted she would, and Nanny had to sew a bow for the back to cover up the mark .

We found old childhood photos of our grandmother and great-grandmother. The majority of the oldest black and white photos had no writing on the back and so we stared at faces we maybe should have known, but did not. We laughed and laughed, in the midst of a weekend full of the kind of tears you imagine you will never run out of, and we picked out random pictures of these unknown men to create a fictional page all about the men who have loved my mother – to create what is, in my family, a must – a joke.

We found the album holding all of their wedding photos – a collection of snapshots and a few Polaroids. We found another album from a ski trip the winter after their wedding – my first time skiing. The two of us pushed our hands in the trunk, gently, and pulled out picture after picture, many we had never seen and stayed up way too late seeing our own faces in different forms, histories we often didn’t even know, making up stories as we amassed a scattered circle of images on the floor around us.

It is now five years later and that handmade book has not been made – probably never will be made. The year that followed that trip was like a sauna that both distilled and distorted all of the images from before. Many of my memories from before that trip, from before the year that followed it, feel damaged – dog-eared, the top layer of the images pulling up from the bottom roughly, colors watery and dull.

Since that trip, mental illness has damaged my parents’ marriage irreparably. And while their marriage is for the courts to deal with now – for both my mother and my father to trudge through a process that neither of them could have ever imagined, a process riddled with events and motions that were once inconceivable – the photo album, in all of its yellowed, detaching glory, is mine to deal with.

It has taken me this long to decide that I will fix it – to fix that one simple thing – to secure each image with photo corners onto clean white pages and unscrew the posts of an album and carefully slide each page into place. I can fix nothing else about this – and until now I wasn’t sure even this was mine to fix – but I can’t imagine my father wants this album back, at least not yet, and so I nurse it into shape. I take each of the obviously amateur photos and look at them with the eyes of a woman who knows where this went, what completely mad road the years rambled and what precise bank they slammed into.

My mother in her handmade eyelet sundress. Me in an almost matching yellow version. My aunt following me down the aisle, so I don’t turn around and run for the hills. The June sun of Fresno setting and, along with the patina of 1970s photos, everything awash in golds and browns and yellows. My grandmother’s backyard filled with chairs and a daisy arch. The cake with white and yellow daisies and my parents shoving it into each others’ faces. The random shots with Coors cans in hand and the appropriately defaced Audi my mother bought for $1.00 — this is, I can see, clearly my family.

I feel like I remember these days so vividly and yet I know that I only remember moments – swimming in the over-chlorinated pool of an Anaheim motel with my new cousins and aunt and uncle (I took the honeymoon and my parents stayed home), my grandmother not recognizing me at the rehearsal dinner since I had cut my long hair off the day before, trying on the dress and touching it – feeling the texture of the eyelet over another fabric. I remember being happy, not at all being the angry, jealous daughter of so many remarriage stories. As I stare at my young, happy face I realize I have always gone back to that moment, even to the time before when I first met my step-father, as a grounding place, a concrete location where I weight myself, remember how to welcome change, to not be knee-jerk angry when something is new. To remember that even at four years old, I had that in me and so I can always find it there, behind my chubby cheeks and freckles.

I want to be able to hold the two young people in those pictures, want to brace them for the future. I recognize, halfway through the process, that this is the most perfect day for me to have taken on this project, this day about love.

It is definitely love in their faces and it is worth remembering this, remembering them like this. My mother’s bright, wide eyes as she hams it up for the camera. My father’s smiling, hairy face as they walk down the aisle as man and wife. The embrace under the arch – my mother on her toes, her arms wrapped around his neck, her wedge shoes, the flowers in her hair. A perfect moment, as so many of our photos are – time stopped from sliding away, from changing what this one day meant into what all the days after it became. My heart aches for those two, in a melancholy way; it wishes them happiness, even more than they found.

I will keep this album until my father wants it back, if he ever does. And whether he does or not, I will have the memory of those eyes, faded and Kodacolor as they are – bright and wide and enamored.