Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them

ELINOR CARUCCI

This photograph is of my grandmother Judith and my mother, Dalia. It was taken at my mother’s Bat Mitzvah in 1963 in Jerusalem.

My mother’s Bat Mitzvah was a huge event, which was unusual to do back then, for a girl. My mom thinks that maybe, because my grandparents never had a son (it was only her and her two sisters), they decided to make their first-born daughter’s Bat Mitzvah a big deal. She told me it made her feel special. That, looking back, it felt like a feminist statement. In a way, it formed who she is today.

My mother remembers every detail: that my grandmother hired a famous tailor to come to the house and make a beautiful dress for my mother, and that she took her to the most famous hairdresser in Jerusalem back then, Max Ha Sapar.

Seeing this picture of my grandmother kissing my mother, on this most important occasion, touches me deeply. It’s the love of a mother. The love my mother continues to pass on to me, now, long after her mother, my grandmother, has passed away. It’s the strongest love of all, a mother’s love.

When I tell my children how much I love them, my son tells me he loves me more. I always answer to him, “You can’t love me more! There is nothing greater than a mother’s love!” Then we argue.

But I do believe it.

I believe a mother’s love is what makes this world bearable, possible. It’s what we will not and cannot survive without. In a world of cruelty and pain, there is this one miracle: a mother’s love.

Looking, almost going, back in time with this photograph, seeing my mother so young, a child to her own mother, I am filled with compassion and affection. There is something so vulnerable in both of them. We tend to forget the inner child that still exists in our parents, the child that, somewhere, they still are. I look at this picture and see my mother: innocent, longing for her mother’s love, for approval and support on her big important day. A maternal sensation fills me . . . and as I feel for my children, I feel for her.

Now, when I see my mother, I also remember to see this girl in her, the girl from the photograph. She is still there, the same girl, my mother.