What Having My First Mother on My Screensaver Changed For Me

As I wrote about in a previous post, the wonderful Joyce Maguire Pavao (anyone need a therapist who is all heart and brain and who says it like it is?!) suggested I keep a picture of my first mother in a place where I could see it because I didn’t talk about her in a way that suggested I allowed her much 3D space in my brain. (The story was flattened to my mother relinquished me at birth and refused to meet me when I found her as an adult and now she is dead.) I had said to Joyce that the photo I found online of my mother frightened me because I thought she looked ugly, and Joyce had responded that my first mother didn’t look ugly to her, but in pain.

That one observation shifted a lot for me. What did I benefit from being such a harsh critic about my mother? What would I have to feel if I accepted her face as the face of the woman who gave birth to me and to allow her into my heart instead of slamming my heart closed?

Her face is not my face, but it is the face that rode above me for nine months, the body under the face creating me, bringing me to life. What happens when I do not love that face? How does the rejection of her affect my heart, my soul, and my being?

I got curious. (I wrote “I got furious” at first instead. I bet at some level that is as true or truer than the intended statement. Oh! The fury of those who get left behind!) I put the photo that was part of her obituary up as the screensaver on my phone. It’s of her face, and she has one hand curled up next to her cheek. As a write this, I realize this is something I often do. It’s so funny how you can see something and see something and not see it at the same time. She is smiling but it also looks a little like a grimace, and her eyes look…I don’t know how to say it. They look directing into the camera, but it’s as if the seeing stops at the soft globe of the eyeball. The doors to her mind appear to be closed.

Who took this photo? Why did they take it? What was she thinking while they held the camera up and maybe said, “Say cheese.”?

Every time I pick up my phone, the screensaver lights up and I see her face. I am getting used to it, and that is what has changed for me: I am getting used to my mother’s face. There are ways that her face are in my face: the nose, the cheeks—and the way her neck sags looks very familiar to me now that I’ve said goodbye to collagen and hello to a 60-year-old neck. The automatic pushing away my system used to feel when I looked at this photo is softening. She’s becoming part of my daily life. My mother’s face comes with me to the grocery store, to the gas station, driving to Westwood. There she is, again and again and again.

She was always there. A mother, I have started to think, can never fully seperate from her child. The mother/child bond is a fact of DNA. It can’t be erased even if names can be whited out and changed. Through my whole life, she was my mother.

Of course, I also had my mother, my Margery Heffron mother. And she was, since I was ten weeks old to when she died the night before my 47th birthday, my mother.

I was mothered by two women in a culture that wants there to be one for the sake of paperwork and so that the mother can claim the right to say “mine”.

I did not give birth to her, but she is mine.

I gave birth to her and left her at the hospital, and so she is not mine.

I don’t know if my first mother claimed me in any way—that story is over, that book is closed.

But I can claim her.

And myself.