1968

MOLLY WIZENBERG

The first time I saw this photograph, I thought it was of me. I was outside the post office on my college campus, nineteen or twenty, when I tore open the envelope and saw a photo tucked inside my grandmother’s usual monthly letter. I remember how I gasped, standing there straddling my bike, when I realized that the face I was looking at wasn’t mine but my mother’s. I let out a sob, I remember: that’s how shocked I was, how confused. There was a date stamped on the back of the photo: December 1968, ten years before I was born. Her hair was short and frosted, much brassier than her natural dark brown. Her mouth hung open like mine does when I’m not thinking about it, as though a fishing sinker were tied to my lower lip. I’d never seen her look so blank, so wide-open, so sort of lost. I’d never seen us look so much alike.

My mother has always seemed like she knew her way, even when she couldn’t have. She was one of a family of seven children, the third-oldest. The family began to collapse in the late eighties—first a brother’s death to AIDS, then a sister to cancer, and on and on—and now, at seventy-two, she’s lost both parents and five of her six siblings. She bolstered herself by getting into therapy in the late eighties, before it seemed like a mainstream thing. I can still see the Codependent No More desk calendar propped on the counter of my childhood kitchen. My mother has worked hard, in her quiet and elegant way, to keep going. She cared for her identical twin sister through a losing battle with pancreatic cancer in 2012. She’d done the same for my father ten years before, when he was felled by metastatic kidney cancer. She became a widow at fifty-six.

And yet she’s out in the world, fit and energetic, reading Lauren Groff and teaching Pilates, as she has for more than two decades. Three years ago, she moved from Oklahoma City to Seattle and into a house a block from mine. Her days are full enough, and my days are full enough, that sometimes we go all week without seeing each other, except when we carpool on Sunday mornings to the high-intensity dance workout class we both love. She’ll come for dinner with a bottle of sauvignon blanc that she wants to try, a new recommendation from the wine guy at Trader Joe’s.

I worry I should see her more, take fuller advantage of our proximity. I never forget that I will lose her. But this feels like us, the rhythm we’ve got. I know it is rare and lucky, as an adult woman, to get to see my mother this way: thriving, still adapting, as living proof of what is possible. I’m trying to memorize her while I can.