1984

CATIE DISABATO

My mother is an artist, and I love this picture of her: lost in creating something, nestled comfortably with her tools, focused on her project. I love how bold she was to take colored markers or pens or pencils into her bed with white sheets, wearing a white outfit.

When I saw this photograph for the first time, I had a moment of supernatural discomfort, because in it, she looks so much like me. That was the structure of my thought, not “I look so much like her” but “she is me,” which I think (hope!) was not a narcissistic slip but instead me opening up my life and inviting my mother to inhabit it with me.

The picture reminds me of a story my maternal grandfather, now passed, told me about my mother. It wasn’t a story about a specific moment in her life but an explanation of her character. When my mother was a teenager they would get into epic fights, screaming battles. My grandfather would send her to her room, but she would continue to argue the whole way up the staircase and shout at him from the top of the stairs.

When Grandpa told me this, a vivid memory came back to me like a shock: standing on the staircase in my childhood home and screaming at my mother. I felt time and space fold, until there was no difference between my mother as a teenager and myself at the same age. My mother and I are very different people, so I love every moment that I feel similar to her. I treasure most deeply the times when I’ve felt that we were not different in any way, at all.