Photographs and Memories

If you're like me, you probably have lots of old photographs somewhere that you take out once in a while to look at them.  I've been thinking about scanning them all so I can keep them in digital format, thereby freeing up a lot of storage space in my closet.  While I would probably keep a number of the actual photographs, there are a lot that I would discard, if I can possibly bring myself to do that.  I have thrown away a few photos in my time, but mostly because they were badly blurred or damaged prints.  I have a hard time for some reason throwing away a perfectly good photo of someone, even if I haven't seen them since high school and barely remember their name. Somehow they represent some little piece of myself--a memory, a long-ago friend, a classmate.  I don't know if I'm afraid that I will discard a bit of myself if I toss out the photo.  What else would cause such a reluctance to jettison excess clutter, given that I've been pretty vigilant in de-cluttering my life as well as helping others with that process?  Am I concerned that the discarding of the photograph means that I have let go of a memory I can never get back?  Is that necessarily a bad thing, to let go of dusty photographs and equally dusty memories?

While I don't have an answer for that, I can say that photographs can be invaluable in offering insights into our lives and our psyches.  I have recently been puzzling over what appears to me to be a recurring them in my life, and that is rejection.  It started with my father and his rejection of responsibility towards his wife (my mother) and their three children.  Not only did he never live up to his financial responsibilities, he also never lived up to his parental and emotional responsibilities.  I don't normally talk about my father, because as far as I'm concerned he was my sperm donor and that's all.  My mother left him when I was six months old, and I'm glad she did before he bashed her head in.  That's what he was working on the day she decided to leave him. He was throwing her against the wall while she was trying to breastfeed me.  

While that is certain to get the Freudians out there licking their chops and nodding their heads over the fact that I am lesbian, that's not what I'm processing at the moment. What I'm processing is the concept of rejection. I've dealt with this so many times, you'd think I'd have licked it by now, but it seems not. I distinctly remember forgiving my father for his rejection of his children. Not only did he not take care of us while we live together, but he also neglected to care for us financially for my entire life. I was six months old when I mom left him, and from that point on until I, the youngest of three children, turned eighteen, he gave us a grand total of one hundred dollars. That's it. When asked why my mother didn't press the issue legally, she explains that he would have simply vanished, and she's probably right.They didn't pursue deadbeat dads very hard in those days. So instead she worked full time for my whole life, leaving the three of us with babysitters or finally as "latchkey kids" long before they coined that phrase. So not only did I experience rejection from my father's inability to take responsibility for his actions and his children, but I also experienced rejection by default from my mother, who had to go to work instead of caring for her six month old baby and my two slightly older siblings.  

While my mother didn't purposely reject us, she did have to feed and clothe us and make sure we had a roof over our heads, which meant that she had to spend all day at work. Her parents came to live with us so they could look after us kids, which was really good for the few years they were still alive. That got us through our early years at least. After they passed away, we had responsible teenagers who were family members or close friends of the family who looked after us until at the ripe old age of nine, eleven, and twelve, we were on our own with only the retired couple from across the street keeping an eagle eye on us from their front porch or living room window. These precious folks became another set of grandparents to us. I know none of us will ever forget their watchful care, even though we got pretty good at giving them the slip and escaping out the back door and over the fence once we hit the teenage years.  

All this time on our own, from the time I was nine, led me to being pretty independent in the long run. While my two older siblings have stayed closer to the old homestead (i.e., suburbia), I ventured off every time I got a chance, beginning when I was thirteen when I spent my first summer with my granny in Kentucky.  Not only did I spend every summer I could away from home during my high school years, but I also spent a year of college in Tennessee, and the other three years in a town a little over an hour away. After college, I left home and never came back except for a two-month stint when I purposely quit my job at an opportune time and went home for the express purpose of spending time with my mom. I had known then that my granny was going to die, so I was in a better position to visit her and to drop everything to attend her funeral.  Had I still been living and working in Seattle when that happened, that would have been harder to pull off.  As it was, my best friend and I simply got in the car and drove up there to be with my family on that side and to bid farewell to my granny, an amazing woman who will appear again in my writings here, no doubt.  

When I got back and was getting ready to spend some time with my mom, she got a call from her old job, from which she had been retired for a couple of years, and I barely saw her again while I was down there.  She came home on weekends, but she was pretty tired from working all week, so we just spent most of our time together quietly, which was fine. During the week while she was gone, I spent my time with my brother recording my music CD, Driftwood: The Music.  In the evenings, I either spent time with my sister at her apartment or I worked on background vocals and harmonies by myself at my mother's house with my two kitties, who had come with me for that two-month visit. The irony of my mother being called back to work during the time in my life that I had set aside specifically to spend with her did not escape me.  I had to spend some serious personal therapy time on that one a couple years later when the theme of rejection came up again.  While I was down there, the woman I had been working on being in a relationship with, but who had no time to spend with me because her grown daughter and her boyfriend had moved in with her, broke up with me AGAIN a couple days before my brother and I were to finish my end of the recording.  

Let me back up here and fill in a few gaps are far as relationships go.  Being lesbian is not an easy thing at any time in history anywhere.  Being a lesbian in a conservative Christian community in the South is a recipe for disaster.  To begin with, I was in denial about it to myself, sort of. I didn't deny that I had a tendency to be attracted to close female friends. That much was pretty obvious. But I was in denial about living out and proud because I felt that I had been called into the ministry, to serve God as a teacher and leader of young people.  Ahem.  Not a good idea in conservative Christian circles if you are gay.  So until I left conservative Christianity, essentially my relationships were all doomed to end badly.  No matter how much I loved these women, guilt won in the end, and I lost.  

Then as I got out of those circles, my relationships began to last longer and therefore deepen. But alas, I suspect the damage had been done for me. I wanted my relationships to last, and I stuck with them until it was obvious that I shouldn't be there any more. I had two separate relationships that last for six years each.   Had the laws been different then, at least one of those would have involved marriage.  The other one, not so much because the woman had already been married once and was not interested in getting hitched to someone else. Both ended for reasons that won't be discussed out of respect for the former partners. While I was the one to walk away from both of these, it was only after the death knoll had been sounding for a while. Although I took the blame both times, it takes two to Tango and when one stops dancing, it gets really uncomfortable.  

That leads me back to the relationship that very nearly sucked my soul out of my chest and left me for dead.  Although I had a couple of brushes with perfectly good potential partners while I was in a couple of the out periods of this in and out, in and out thing we were doing, those were doomed from the beginning because I was in those days like the walking dead in some ways.  I recognized that I didn't have much to give because there wasn't much of me left.  It took a couple years of living on Puget Sound for me to heal from this disaster of a relationship.  I did finally heal, mostly.  I was healed, but I was still rather fragile.   Being the fool I am, however, I wasn't able to leave well enough alone.  At the end of the disaster of a relationship, I met a woman, that I can safely say turned my world upside down.  I wanted badly to be with her, but she was married.  So instead of letting go completely of the bad relationship that was really at that point only a nasty hangover, I clung to that dead corpse of the old relationship, as well as the excuse of this new women having a child, and told her that I wasn't interested.  

It's never good to lie.  Not to yourself.  Not to others.  I committed the worse kind of lie.  I thought about it long and hard and then lied to her.  Whatever the rationale, however altruistic, it was still a lie.  I should have at least told her the truth: She rocked my world, but I couldn't even think about being in a relationship with a woman who was married, no matter what the extenuating circumstances in that marriage. She needed to work on coming out to herself and the world around her, and everything that meant, and she needed to do it on her own terms, for her own reasons, and not because she had fallen for me.  AND I needed to protect myself from the fallout of everything she needed to do for herself before she could be with me.  I didn't tell her all those things, and I have regretted that to this day.

I'm not sure I could have articulated each of those things in the moment as well as I can today, but that's what it boiled down to, even though I blamed it on something else.  With that lie, I broke her heart, and I knew it would, even though I did think that it was better that she find her way without the pressure of having someone waiting in the wings.  Only now after we have been together on and off, while the divorce has painstakingly played out, she has broken mine, because all these years later, it has still come down to the same thing. She needs to have time to go through all she has to go through and decide if she is still interested in being in a relationship with me once she gets to the other side.  Apparently for some masochistic reason, probably the rejection theme, I had to stand by and watch her walk away with my heart in her hands. Eventually, she just walked away altogether and I had to let her go. 

Back to the photographs I've been reluctant to discard. I have a large photograph of my fourth grade class. Just before the photo was taken, my boyfriend at the time, we'll call him Robert since that was his name, broke up with me. We were going steady. Yes, I was nine, but love was important even back then. In the class photo, he is sitting grinning like the Cheshire cat, while I am for all intents and purposes sitting there with a broken heart, pouting. What an image to capture for my lifetime memory book. Yet it is very telling. It is a photographic representation for my whole life as far as love is concerned. Sad, but true.

A string of broken hearts is nothing to be proud of, but perhaps they are why I am a poet and a singer/songwriter. Perhaps they are responsible for all of the books I've written and published too. Is it a fair trade off for a life of love with one person? I can't say since I'll never know what that feels like. I do know now what it feels like to have loved someone for decades and to know that they have loved me for all those decades too. For larger reasons and greater purposes, we didn't find our way into a love relationship until late in life, but at least we are together now and I can finally heal that nine-year-old girl in the photograph. It's about time, wouldn't you say?