My cousin got a scanner. He’s been sending me photos from the past, sometimes images from before my time. I find them frightening for some reason. They represent a thing that seems never to have lived, but the captured image is proof of that existence, proof of my history. And I don’t like it. I know too much about the pain of those times. But I look into them anyway, for clues maybe, in wonder mostly. How did they live? Some of them didn’t survive.

Dave’s mom gave me a gigantic framed photo of my mom as a toddler. She thought it would be a special surprise - a good one. I was disappointed immediately… I can’t explain it. There she was, waiting in anticipation to give me this gift she was certain I would enjoy. The pressure to act sufficiently gleeful and surprised was there, but I didn’t live up to it. Some deeper mechanism responded instead: "This is supposed to make me happy?," it seemed to say. I think a "Thank You," maybe a smile or something else came out, but she knew: She knows the difference between genuine and fake.

Slipped it back into its box, placed it back onto the table where it sat until I carried it to the office and assigned it to the lone empty square in the bookshelf. After Dave’s family left, and when Dave suddenly said he needed that square shelf for something else, I took it out of the box. Where can one put something that huge… and obtrusive? I put it beside my bed on the table where I keep the tiny baby picture of myself, the one with the lock of hair, that my mother always kept next to her bed. My mom, sitting and smiling - which was rare for her but I imagine she hadn’t taught herself not to when she was just two or three - overwhelms my side table, the small picture of me, and even the Korean lamp set there. I see it every morning, every night, but it doesn’t register; that is, I don’t look at it and realize that it’s her. To me, it doesn’t look like her, it’s not the "her" I knew. It’s just a picture of a pretty little blonde girl smiling, the black and white photo having been painted over in "natural" tones, as was popular then. I have to think, "That’s my mom."

I want to take it down, slip it into the box, and leave it. But I don’t. The frame implied it was for display and I am always one to point out that my family never seemed to have photos of my mom around (read: out for all to see) after she died, despite having photos of everyone else including non-family members. Taking it down makes me the same as they, and I wouldn’t want to admit to that. Yet, I think there is something in being allowed to choose the memory to be cherished. I don’t think of my mom ever as a toddler. I remember her large, soft, and warm - a mother. I’m still trying to come to terms with her in that role (as mother), concentrating hard sometimes on reconstructing those memories just to prove that she existed - organizing them in a way that is meaningful to me as daughter abandoned. Remembering too that she was a child confuses that process and so I stare at that strange girl in the photo telling myself she is my mother.

Two years ago at my G-ma’s house I sifted through a bunch of images, the sum of which inspired an epiphany: Suddenly my G-ma wasn’t just the head of our family, but a woman who was once my age, a woman who no doubt plotted a future like I plot mine. And I felt sad. Things she reveals to me make me think her plans were never realized. (You only get one shot.) I was inspired - this new connection between us motivated a project. I came back another day, sifting through old photos again, but this time with a purpose. I left with six photos: two of G-ma, two of mom, two of me. I had this idea of connecting the three of us as women and as daughters, and for them, implicitly as mothers too. Two pictures of each of us: one as a girl (daughter), the other as a young woman (potential mother, but still woman with dreams). These pictures are all in black and white. Each set (that is, the two photos of each of us) would be framed separately with the thin-metal frame colored to match our respective eye colors, which was different for each of us.

Thinking about this project has been enormously meaningful and fulfilling for me. Two years later, it is unrealized, but I think of it occasionally when I know I’m going back to the States where I have access to the kinds of tools I need to complete the job. I have carried those pictures with me back and forth across the Pacific in a small white envelope in anticipation that I might actually get to perform the task, but I never am able, in the short time we’re there, to devote the attention it deserves.

I will finish it.

Distinction: Pictures I waded through, grabbing out the ones that touched me in some way VS. pictures someone else saw that touched them in a way that is contrary to the way I feel when I look at them.

Not that my cousin is sending me photos thinking about how I would feel. I know that he’s just finding interesting old photos, scanning them, and shootin’em across the line. I’m totally cool with that and I like getting all these old shots actually, even if they are a frightful reminder of my origins. I’m like that: I’m one who always picks off the scabs before they’re ready.

The most recent image to materialize on my screen was a shocker though: my family or the cast of Redneck Rampage? It is telling, explanatory. My memories conveniently neglect the whole truth. Left to right: My uncle Fred, the little boy is my cousin Brian, then my mom holding a dog, my grandpa, my grandma holding my cousin Bob (who sent the picture to me), and my ex-aunt Marilyn. My mother looks almost exactly like my cousin Katie. Dave didn’t even realize who it was.

I like that she looks like Katie. It means that we don’t look alike. I feel my heart dropping when I say that; it’s a horrible thing for a daughter to say. The truth is, I think that if I am not like her - if I don’t resemble her, if I don’t do the things she did, if I can be her opposite - then I won’t die like she did. I am conscious of this; I accept it and sometimes pursue it.