The Tree
I hunted through the cabinets where I’ve stored the old family photos to find this one this morning. It’s probably my favorite Christmas picture.
There are so many things about this picture that I’m haunted by, my mother chief among them. She’s barely 23 here — quite mature, by the standards of the time, to have had her first baby, and yet I can never see this picture without focusing on how unbelievably young she is. I want so badly to reach back through the image and help.
I also can’t help but focus on how tired she looks: I’m about to be four months old, and it looks like it’s been a pretty eventful four months. Her wrists are so delicate, and her skin is so pale. And yet for all that superficial fragility, she would hold everything together a few years down the road, when it all must have seemed like it was falling apart.
Youth aside, exhaustion aside, in this picture is my most intense connection to my mother. But for a slightly different nose, the girl holding the baby could perfectly well be me. My life, just starting in this picture, could have circled around to this point with no effort at all.
So much of the path I’ve taken — that she helped me take — has been different, and yet it all for me starts here, in the open-mouthed wonder of it all. How did they get this thing in here? And what for?
Merry Christmas, and happy holidays.
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