In old photos, she always looks sad. It’s a strange disconnect; in every memory I have, my mother is laughing, but in every photo her head is tilted down, as if with a weight of sorrow. The photos are all from before me, and I’d like to take the credit for her transformation, but the truth is they’re all from before my father, too, and I think that’s closer to the heart of it. She always said portraits were kinder, so why take a photo when she has her own portraitist?
I might think that was it, that the photos showed a hidden truth that my father’s drawings never did, except I have been saved from that sorrowful interpretation by a single sheet of yellowed paper. It’s an ink drawing he did of her the night they met, before they had started dating. In it, she is bowed by a grief that she tries to hide. I think he was entranced by that sadness; you can almost see him falling in love with every pen stroke. It is the last sorrowful image of her, and I wish I knew that story! How love saved her. How finding a soul mate transformed her, healed her even. It gives me hope.
But when I ask her about it, she claims she doesn’t know what I mean. She smiles and changes the subject. She asks me about my life.
But I have the drawing, and I know. My mother knew love, and it wiped the sorrow from her shoulders. And someday, I hope, I will know a love like that.
Image by April Milne.