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My grandmother’s portrait stared back at me alongside her family, taken in Norway before she moved to America.  I gazed into her eyes, trying to see the soul of the woman who was routinely battered by her husband, wondering where the fight in them had gone.  The stamp of her features was clearly demarcated on her progeny, but so, for a couple, was the propensity to accept abuse.  Her husband’s face was transparent in displaying his nature.  A bulldog he was; a bully and miscreant who deserved prison and stayed free.  Their legacy had been carried out through the generations.

My children’s pictures shone up at me but I had to ask – how much had I dampened the light of their beings?  How much had their father and I?  I couldn’t look at the happy times without knowing the hard ones were soon on their heels.  One time my in-laws were visiting, never easy, and tension was peaked.  My husband’s temper blew.  He literally tore the garage apart, breaking things, yanking them off walls, emptying cartons.  He took me into our bedroom, trying to control me physically and verbally.  Then he jumped out the window and took off.  I was terrified of him and for him.  He was clearly not in his right mind.  It took a couple of hours to locate him and when I did, he ran onto a railroad trestle crossing the Sacramento River.  I called the police, I was so worried for him.  When all was said and done, he had calmed down and we returned home, it was to see our six year old daughter and her grandmother cleaning the garage (out of sight, out of mind).  It is a day vividly etched into my daughter’s consciousness.  That was how she saw her parents in conflict resolution. 

In point of fact, argument and tears were constant remembrances for them.  My son, now a young adult, recently watched a video of our family from his early childhood.  He was shocked to see his father and me laughing, teasing each other, having a water gun fight.  He couldn’t remember us in love.  It was one of the saddest things I had ever heard for there was love, a great deal of it.  We just didn’t know healthy ways to express it or how to identify our true feelings.  It is remarkable that these kids have grown into such capable, successful, empathic young people.  Their memories didn’t show them the way.

There are fifteen large albums to stack side by side on the bookshelf.  In the past ten years, I have probably only taken ten or eleven rolls of film . . .one for each sports season, one or two for vacations.  It is enough.  I have less I want to forget.  Any time with my son is blessed as he has lived in California during that time.  But the futility of pictures filling books which never again see the light of day exhausts me.  My years of infamous decrepitude are better left forgotten.  My shame has taken sharp reliefs of the person who failed to live with honor then.  Yes, there are the good times, but really, wouldn’t I be just as well served by the vocal remembrances of friends and family?  Couldn’t my life look forward now rather than back?  I deserve that.  My family does to.  Let me skip from childhood to graduations to weddings to grandchildren, vacations, friends, and fun.  The balance can be sealed in a time capsule to be opened in 100 years, when my descendents will shake their heads, ask who these people are and why they should care.  Yes, it seems fitting.  Otherwise, the weight of memory is too much too bear.