by Stephanie Shapiro

In my professional wedding photos, my mother doesn’t exist. Oddly, she does appear in some photos snapped at the ceremony itself, but not in the lifeless images ordered up by my father six months later. The original photos that included my mother were too informal, he claimed. What he really meant was they were an all-too candid record of his ex-wife’s existence that he preferred to forget.

To fix that record, we all gathered at my father’s apartment for a re-shoot. All of us, that is, except my mother. Years later, I realized that my father had implicated his children and their spouses in an identity theft. My husband Tom and I, as well as my brother and sister, had been drafted to invent an alternative fact of a family. With the squeeze of a shutter, evidence of my father’s failed marriage and its unpleasant aftermath would vanish, as would my mother.

As a visual artifact, the photos had the insidious power to exile my mother from her own sad narrative. But my mother hardly needed reminding of her own urge to disappear. Fearing embarrassment in Princeton, N.J., where we lived, my mother, a high-school dropout, had steered clear of well-educated, middle-class people who unintentionally laid bare her insecurity. With a few exceptions, she preferred the company of others like her, the “disappeared,” including a morbidly obese woman who never left her house and Peaches, a young Black man born with cerebral palsy, who never left his bed. My mother also hung out in a Trenton bar where she befriended and often spent the night with men marginalized by their race. Their trauma and invisibility put my mother at ease.

Well before we moved to Princeton, I sensed my mother’s desperation. The banality of mid-century suburban life, the mountains of unfolded laundry and bland prescriptions for motherhood sent her reeling into manic, mad housewife mode. Back then, I clung to her for comfort. I also inhaled her despair. The two emotions were linked together, as pleasure and pain can be.

When we were very little, my mother fled to Miami on account of her “nerves” and refused to return. I remember my father arguing with her on the phone. “You said you’d fly home soon,” he said. “It’s already been two weeks.” Eventually, my mother came home, tanned and more restless than ever.

In high school, we kids existed on frozen pizza and Tastykakes while my mother went missing for days at a time. Whenever she announced a trip to the grocery store, I knew she wouldn’t be home for a long time. The night I graduated from high school, she tried an even more daring escape by attempting suicide. My mother downed a bottle of pills, but had second thoughts. A mysterious Trenton friend rushed her to the hospital.

Later, my mother bolted again. Although well under 65, she bought a condo in a Florida retirement village. There, she lived in a self-medicated haze of declining mental health, befriending people she met at gem shows and flea markets and even those encountered after dialing a wrong number. At times, she may have even believed she was happy. When I visited, she flirted with strangers who served her in diners, checked out her groceries and filled her prescriptions, while ignoring me.

No matter how much she tried to distance herself from her children, my mother lives within us. In many ways, we share her skewed view of the world and her refusal to respect norms that can crush anyone with an imagination. My sister and I inherited her love of objects with an off-beat beauty. In the early 1960s, she introduced our bland suburban neighborhood to an interior design style she dubbed “Early Halloween” by decorating with massive bouquets of dried flowers spray-painted gold and rustic mobiles of shriveled orange peels.

When we moved from the Jersey suburbs to Princeton, my friends fell in love with my mother for her hard-won wisdom and mockery of the town’s intellectual airs. “In Princeton, there are no dead-end streets,” she said. “There are only ‘no outlets.’” She also knew cool. My brother’s best friend wrote a book on rhythm and blues and dedicated it to my mother. She had been the kooky mom who had turned him on to “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” “Dock of the Bay” and other R&B classics.

The new wedding photos were meant to strike from the record my mother’s native brilliance, as well as her disturbed mind. Perhaps most cruelly, the photos denied her credit for having raised us, no matter how imperfectly, in my father’s absence. They stripped her of her wit, insight and sense of the absurd, qualities she gifted to her children, and that helped us survive our childhood.

We came to the photo shoot as props, like those life-size cardboard photos of fans that populated empty stadiums during the pandemic, but not nearly as enthusiastic. Dressed again in wedding finery, we gathered in the condo my father and his girlfriend shared in a tony Washington, D.C. neighborhood. Filled with African sculptures, Mughal miniatures and other artifacts from their international travels, the place, itself, appeared to strive for approval by Washington’s best and brightest.

The girlfriend stuck to the sidelines until my father insisted that she join us in front of the photo screen. “Come here, Dear,” he said, acting all impromptu. I suspected that had been the plan all along. The photographer snapped away, bestowing the childless girlfriend with an attractive, if bored, brood, whom she didn’t much care for. Next, my father and she posed by themselves as the happy couple. It didn’t occur to me at the time that these were supposed to be their phony wedding pictures as well as mine. The two would never marry, much to her lasting and vocal disappointment.

It’s no surprise that the photos ordered up by my father fooled no one. In them, we stand with stiff and soulless formality. We’re pasty and our smiles wan. I vaguely recall one on display in the Washington condo for awhile. In time, that also disappeared. The photos recently resurfaced in a box of stuff during my father’s move to a retirement community. Although his memory remains strong, he recalls nothing about the photo session. “What shoot?” he asked.

My mother reappeared at my son’s wedding reception three years ago, among photographs displayed of the newlyweds’ loved ones who had passed away. In a photo that I treasure, my mother is young and beautiful. Her long, blond hair is swept into a glamorous 1940s style. She sits by the switchboard she operated for the daily newspaper where she met my father. My mother hadn’t been forgotten by my son and his wife, who had never met her.

Erasing Mom

Death Rattle

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