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May 7, 2008
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My first grade school picture is my favorite, with my shy, crooked smile and uncooperative blonde hair tied up, one on each side of my head. Two identical fuzzy school bus yellow balls sat atop each pigtail. Maybe it was the style at the time, these rubber bands with fuzzy balls attached to them. My feelers. If I didn’t remember them so fondly I’d simultaneously laugh-groan at myself for looking like a cartoon caterpillar. I loved those rubber bands. I’m wearing a navy blue dress with tiny white and yellow flowers and a huge white ruffled bib-like monstrosity Sears saw fit to incorporate into the design, and yet I still smile. I loved that dress and I loved the yellow balls. My mother dressed me well.
Around the same time I began to wear barrettes that were woven with satiny ribbon that streamed down past my ear so that I heard the star-shaped beads on the end click together when I moved my head. Those were for special occasions, like the Christmas I wore the red and green woven barrettes with the jingle balls knotted at the end of the threads. I wore a swingy red, white and green skirt, a white blouse with red buttons and a crooked red bow tie. (A RED. BOW TIE.) That was the year my mother arranged for Santa to stop at our trailer on his way across the world. Somehow, impossibly, there was a sleigh in the street when I ran to the window in disbelief. Whether or not it was attached to a Dodge Dart is up in the air.
It’s interesting, looking at this snapshot of one Christmas in my life. Not just the foreground, as there’s nothing to see there other than MY RED BOW TIE and typical “smiling way too hard” child’s grin. Santa is crouched before the glittering, tinsel strewn Christmas tree. I can make out a Burger King Muppets glass on a thin, rickety TV table; one of two of our hideous mismatched sofas in the background, a shockingly repellent brown floral piece of furniture that was neither comfortable nor attractive. A formidably colored afghan was draped over the rear, but why wouldn’t there be. No couch in the 80s was complete without an afghan seventeen shades of hideosity.
Another Christmas, in another living room, I was captured with my jaw dropped in surprise and a look of complete enthrallment on my chubby face. She used to buy me elaborately dressed dolls that I displayed proudly on my bedroom shelves. Since they were to look at and appreciate and not to play with, I would stand there looking up, displaying and appreciating. They were regal, beautiful, with their creamy complexions and expressions of beatific peace looking down at me, captivated and astonished at their beauty.
I saved them all these years, although I don’t know that she kept the box of childhood keepsakes I had stored in a guest bedroom closet. I always just assumed that I had some time to retrieve them before situating in a house with more space.
The dolls are gone, my fuzzy ball hair ties long since broken, my barrette jewelry rusted and frayed in a garbage dump somewhere. Like a lot of things, they were loved and will never be forgotten, but they are definitely irretrievable. They’re gone. If, though, I look hard enough at a photograph or in my mind, I can remember that they were once there. I can close my eyes and see all the little pieces of my life that were, for reasons great and small, precious to me.
And she was there, I know that. I loved her with the intensity of a thousand suns. She gave me those memories and I am forever grateful for it.
But she stopped being a mother a long time ago. On a bad day, I hate her. Most days I reserve comment, take a deep breath and think of something else. And sometimes, like when I think of these little moments she gave to me, I miss her.
But I’m over it.
