Of Moms and Men: A Memoir (working title, book still in progress)
Excerpt:
PROLOGUE
The Picture Starts the Story
They say that pictures don’t lie but it is also true that, like a painting, what you see in the picture is subjective dependent on the viewer. This picture, above, is the only one I have of my mother with her arm around me. When I look at it, I like to think that she loved me in this picture, at that moment.
As an adult and a mother of four myself, it’s easy, I know, to love a sleeping three year old. Still, I have to suppose there was love in my early years. I cannot imagine there was none, or that I felt unloved as a baby and toddler. Maybe I felt bored, since as you can see in the picture above, I was sleeping. (I wore this expression often years later when attending too-long meetings in corporate America). Actually, for years I thought this was a picture of my Mom reading to me, except that I love books and I can’t imagine I would have slept through anything as exciting as those old Little Golden Books, with nail-biter tales like Doctor Joe The Bandage Man.
But I wear glasses now. There is no book in the picture.
My slightly older brother, Marty, looks happy in the picture, maybe because he is unaware that he and I have the same haircut that seems to indicate our hair was cut by parents who stuck a bowl over our heads and trimmed around them. From my perspective during childhood, my brother Marty always seemed content with the status quo, so I think it’s a good guess he was loved, enjoyed his bowl cut, and felt happy in this photo.
My mother also looks relatively happy there, though I’m not positive if she had yet divorced my father in this picture. Of course, divorce could ultimately be a happy moment, depending. This picture is dated August 1957, and my younger brother, Frankie—different father—was born in June of 1958. Hmmmmm.
Whatever the case, I like to imagine my mother loved me in this picture. Maybe because, going forward, I would never be sure of that again.
