“Open it,” she said. As I flipped it open about midway through, I saw a lot of black-and-white photos, most of them pictures of her or my father, sometimes together and sometimes alone. They looked very happy.
“I don’t understand,” I said after leafing through the pages for a few moments.
Mother reached across and flipped the pages back. She stopped at one page that had a picture of her when she was very young. I’d guess that she was about the same age I was then, when the picture was taken. Father was in it also. Conner and Rose, 1972, the picture was titled. I looked up at her blankly in confusion. She nodded to the picture. “Take a close look there,” she said. “What do you see?”
“I see you and Father,” I answered immediately. “Before he died.”
“Look closer.” I looked down. “Now, look at me.” I did so. My confusion was still writ large on my face and she noticed instantly. With a roll of her eyes she said. “Do it again. Look at the picture and then look at me.”
“I get it,” I said blandly. “In the picture you’re younger and now you’re older. So what? How does that answer anything?”
Mother, however, remained stoic. “Now… look at your father,” she told me.
And so I did. And then it hit me like a bolt of lightning. I looked back up at her quickly. “He was older!” I announced.
She nodded. “Now I want you to turn the pages back even further. Go back through the years. Keep your eyes open. It shouldn’t be too difficult to figure it out.”
I did as she instructed. As the years rolled backwards in the album, both she and my father got younger and younger. When she was at about 15 years old and he about 30, another face suddenly appeared in the pictures. It was another woman. A woman closer to Father’s age. I continued turning the pages further and further back in time. Mother grew younger with every image, as did Father and this other woman. There were more images of this strange woman and Father, fewer of Mother. More and more years peeled back until it was clearly evident that this woman was actually my grandmother- their wedding pictures said it all. I’d never known her. I didn’t even know that she existed or what she looked like. I’d never thought to ask, I guess, and Mother had never bothered to inform me… until then.
I then turned the pages in the reverse direction, going back forward in time. They were all happy and loving in every picture, that much was evident. When my grandmother stopped being in the pictures, there was a look in both my father’s and mother’s eyes that I hadn’t noticed before. It was a look of strained happiness, of pain that was slowly abating and only being assuaged by their closeness and love. A few years of them being alone, however, and a new look filled their eyes. The happiness had returned, only now it was just them. Mother was older in those pictures, about 18 years old perhaps, and when pictures of me as an infant began to appear, I could see that the love in their eyes was a love that they shared for each other.
The penny finally dropped and I slammed the book closed in shock. I did not jump up from my chair or fly off into histrionics; I simply stared at my mother in stunned silence as the full import of what those pictures had shown me sank in. We stared at each other for a very long time in that silence, her watching me think and me thinking about how I should view her.
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