This is Not a Photo of My Mom By Lindsay Lee Wallace
This is Not A Photo of My Mom
By Lindsay Lee Wallace
My mom Debbie would have been 67 today. I’m eating scrambled eggs in a green vinyl booth, listening to a little girl across the linoleum count down the minutes until she turns eight while sparkly letters sway on springs atop her festive headband and wish the entire diner a Happy Birthday. She encircles her trove of blueberry silver dollar pancakes with her arms, protecting them from the greedy hands of the other kids packed into her booth and declaring, “one minute!” and normally I would be wondering what it would be like if my mom were here right now—turning 67 over weak coffee, delighted by the coincidence of it all because she loved stuff like that.
But instead, I’m wondering what her eighth birthday was like. Whether she shared her pancakes with her little sister, my aunt Angela, whose name now makes my blood ice, who was once just my mom’s first friend and a kid with sticky palms. If she was excited. If she got the gifts she wanted, or if she felt too shy to ask. Whether her parents gazed at her with that soft shock—that look I wouldn’t realize until later was the loss and wonder of watching your baby age—the way she did at me, the way this mom is at her daughter now, as the countdown finally reaches zero and she is finally eight and everyone throws their arms around her.
I know part of watching your parents age is getting to know them as whole people, someone other than just parents. But memorializing them is the antithesis. The longer and more ardently you remember them, the more their whole being crystallizes into who they were to you.
I love this photo of my mom, because it’s not a photo of my mom. It’s a photo of Debbie. It’s a photo of a kid who can’t even conceive of being anyone other than someone’s baby, blowing out the candles on her birthday cake, wishing for something I couldn’t possibly fathom, being celebrated on her birthday just for being her. It’s my way of knowing my mom as more than just my mom––as someone else, as a whole person.
Lindsay Lee Wallace is a multidisciplinary writer and freelance journalist whose work exploring topics like culture, digital space, health equity, and grief has appeared in Time, Slate, Teen Vogue, Bitch Media, and the Sarah Lawrence Review, among other publications. Her short plays have been staged by Infinite Variety Productions, and she is based in New York City.
