Page 126 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

120 CULTURAL STUDIES

‘(…my mother as a young bride, her lips darkened with red lipstick (when I came along
her lips would be frosted pink)…’

My father’s album (which he sent directly to me after my grandmother’s death)
begins with photographs not of himself, but of my mother when they were first
married: the year was 1953. This blunt, one might even say shocking, beginning
is an ending. It is the ending of something that I am only beginning to understand
now: a final severing of that (umbilical) something between a mother and her son
—that something which began with my father’s tumbles inside his mother, his
elbow poking between her ribs, in the months before his birth in 1926. Though
my father remained devoted to my grandmother, marriage changes things
between a son and a mother—especially when his father/her husband was barely
there. As I turn the black pages weighted with pictures and other memorabilia
(cards, an occasional newspaper clipping), I feel as if I am watching one of the
old Super 8 family movies that we never had—only in reverse. (When I was
a child I loved watching other people’s home movies this way.) Stopping and
starting, the timing is all off; parts are left out. My heart feels heavy with the