March 1, 2026 marked the fifty-first year since my mother’s death. I prefer to honor her on her birthday—February 4th, 1915—but this year was a little different. With the help of Neda Movahed, I finally went through boxes of slides my father took, photos ranging from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. With these pictures came a whole host of new ways to think about my mother.
Perhaps because we were both so young when she died (she was 60, I was 27), the narratives I held about her and me and our family never changed. In my experience, history and memory shift as new experiences replace the older stories, but with my mother, I held on firmly to what I knew. But the photos told me there was so much more to the story. And now, at this late age, I have been gifted with a past that might as well be a different movie. It is not so much that the pictures tell me more about our relationship; they tell me more about her in the world. She is more gregarious, with her focus more outward than she is the introspective, reflective and private person she was with me. Or maybe she was also this way with me and I just don’t remember it that way.
Then again, I have to remember that so much of our time together was her driving me to dance class, or us washing the dishes together… there was no camera around and our hands were busy with other necessities, our thoughts flying quietly out the window.
