Mum

Over the summer I was doing a story in my hometown, filming a segment down at the town wharf, a place I had not been to in many years but could still conjure up in my mind perfectly. I spent so many languid summer days there as a child, teenage mischief and stolen cigarettes — even getting nearly trampled there by a rogue moose on one particularly hot July day.

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep at night, I imagine that pier. I can still walk it in my mind as though I’m really there. I run along the cracked concrete, smell the rich salt air and the stink of rotten wood, clam flats, fish guts, until I reach the end. When I get there, I look out at the bay and I imagine myself throwing everything that worries me over the edge, watching it flutter down to the surface of the waves, being blown up and away on a sea’s breathy wind. I trust the ocean to take it from me like a message in a bottle, or to drown it, sinking it down to dark depths that will never trouble me.

The dark depths of my parent’s house, however, trouble me. It’s a dark house, nestled down a beaten-up dirt driveway lined with what could only be described as overgrowth; puckerbrush. My mother keeps the house cold. There is a fine film of dust over most of the house, because it is largely unlived in. Especially since the dog passed away last year.

My mother, (Mum as she was always called, never Mom, never Mommy or Mother) greets me as though she’s a bit startled that I’m really in the house again. I haven’t lived there in twelve years, but the room I used to sleep in still holds pieces of me that no one was ever sure what to do with. Mum is mostly excited to see my dog, who she finds delightfully odd.

I’m just happy to see her smiling.

When I was growing up, Mum was in a constant state of physical and mental illness. She was emaciated, haggard, short-fused, terrified, and distant. She didn’t laugh, but it never stopped me from trying to to elicit some kind ofjovial response. I don’t have any photographs, or even any mental pictures, of her where she does not appear ill. I don’t think any exist.

She’s aware of this. I whip out my camera to show her and my brother the pictures I took by the sea. My work, as it is. Something I’m slowly learning to be proud of, something that is helping to define who I am in spite of who I used to be.

We sit in the only room in the house that catches any sunlight: my old bedroom, which is filled with an unused piano, brickabrack, stacks of books and clothes. My dog immediately hops up onto my old bed and falls asleep.

This makes my brother laugh.

I lift my camera.

I start shooting.

My mother asks if I’ll take some portraits of her that she could give my father. He, unlike me, probably does have some long-forgotten memory or photograph of her when she wasn’t quite so sick. At the very least, their wedding pictures hold them both in collective memory as young and bright.

She would like him — maybe all of us — to have at least one picture of her where she looks okay. Where she looks — it hangs in the air, how she wants to rewrite history, does she want to look healthy? Happy?

I oblige, and as I’m snapping I think — I will be glad to have these. But I also think, this is the future of my face, of my body. In spite of how disease ravened her body for decades, she’s aged extremely well.

Still, she’s only forty-eight.

Not old by any means.

She’s done her hair up, colored her face.

Even through the lens, I see where her eyes are permanently sunken in. I see how dull they are (“I can fix that,” I assure her, and I’m talking about Photoshop but maybe I’m also talking about fixing everything, because that’s what I’ve always tried to do for her, for all of us). But there are a few times where her mouth turns up in an impish grin, like mine often does. The light in the room — the only light — does her good. Her skin is lovely, not nearly as wrinkly as she thinks it is. Her hands are still thin, long fingers, a map of blue veins that show how far her body had to travel, how many times that blood bled so slowly that it nearly stopped, for her to arrive here.

For us both to arrive here.

She thinks she’s old. She assures me that the only displeasure she has about the portraits is from looking at herself (from seeing who she is, who she has become), and is not commentary on my photography skills.

When she asks me to have a few prints made up, she offers to pay.

I tell her no.

“Let them be a gift,” I say.

Because that’s what they are to me.