Broken Pictures

Reading at: https://youtu.be/diB2Sb4jki8

Broken Pictures

When I woke up on my birthday, the rain was running in rivers down my window. It was was the perfect day to stay inside. Most days in sunny California, I dreamed about having a stormy afternoon to cuddle up under a blanket with my two cats and a good book in front of my electric fireplace. Unfortunately, it was too late to change my plans, though I secretly resented that the choice wasn’t up to me, especially today. The dark skies felt like a warning that I was not going to like what was coming, but I had promised my mom that I would spend my birthday with her. She had specifically asked that I teach her how to roast vegetables in the oven for dinner, which seemed like such an odd request, but I was grateful for her attempt to create a meal that I could enjoy, instead of having to pick around the plate for the pieces that I could eat. Knowing I was a vegetarian, my mom thought I must be an expert on anything having to do with vegetables, an opinion I took as a compliment.

The day was surprisingly delightful. The rain let up for a while in the afternoon, just long enough for us to take the horses out for a short ride. The ground was muddy, but we were able to navigate around the puddles enough to steer clear of the slippery footing. The horses were happy to nibble on the fresh greens that had sprung up from the recent rains, but startled when the stalks they were nibbling snapped back and splashed their faces with residual rain drops. Above our heads, blackbirds played in the grey sky. When we returned to the barn, we cleaned the mud out of deep grooves in the bottom the horses’ hooves with a small hook and rinsed their legs clean, before putting them back in their stalls to roll in the fresh wood shavings.

Birthdays were difficult for my mom. She had lost her father when I was only two years old, and she reminded me often, “My dad loved celebrating birthdays! They always remind me of him!” Usually, this statement was accompanied by silent tears of longing and appreciation. Today, she added “He loved you so much!”

Even though it was just the two of us in the middle of a global pandemic, it was, perhaps, the most normal birthday we had shared in decades. We had a video call with my brother and his family in Colorado and another one with close friends who had become family over the years. We didn’t talk about the past. The past was behind us.

When I came out as gay in college, my church and my family disowned me. They thought that “tough love” would help me make better life choices. I’m sure, at the time, nobody understood that would lead to decades of our lives being spent apart. When it happened, I was specifically warned by my mother never to come to another family gathering. She made it very clear that I would not be welcome. She informed me calmly that if I ever returned home, she would call the police and have me arrested for trespassing. My friends stood guard at the door to my pink floral bedroom, while I gathered what I could take as quickly as I could. I grabbed beloved books and photographs, as many clothes as I could carry, and my favorite stuffed toy from childhood - a fuzzy dapplegray horse with a threadbare, stitched smile. I watched my childhood home disappear into the night as the car sped down the driveway.

Not heeding the warnings, my favorite uncle Eddie drove to my college dorm to pick me up for the next Thanksgiving at his house. He didn’t care what anybody else said, I still belonged to his family. When my mother arrived at the house, she boldly declared in front of the whole family that she no longer had a daughter. She looked right through me and never said a word to me. That lasted thirty years.

I survived and made a life with chosen family and dear friends, and birthdays and holidays came and went without parents or siblings. We still had traditions - matching pajamas for people and pets, brunches with lots of alcohol, extravagant Halloween costumes, and simple presents from the heart, because sometimes, that was all we could afford. One tradition I could never shake was the sadness of not belonging to my birth family, even on days that were cherished by the rest of world as meaningful pauses to celebrate family togetherness. Over the decades, many kind families included me in their gatherings, but somehow, seeing their love only made my lack of family more difficult.

The last few years have changed a lot of things. The COVID-19 pandemic sent us all into isolation and sent me hurtling into divorce from my wife due to pandemic-survival differences. Sporadic wellness checks on my mom turned into weekly Sunday night dinners that helped us both endure the isolation. We have learned more about each other during these weekly meals than we had ever known in the past. There was a new kind of understanding and importance to the words being shared, as illness and death rampaged through the world. My mom admitted she was feeling her mortality more every day as the months wore on. Even her devout Christianity softened around the edges, as she shared stories of her youth that I had never heard before. My favorite one was of her being so stoned one night in her twenties that she ate her way through almost an entire bag of marshmallows before she vomited. She confessed that this was the reason that she didn’t like marshmallows, and, in fact, hadn’t eaten one in the fifty years since. I listened, giggling at the story, trying to hide my genuine shock at the thought of my very conservative mother ever being stoned. I loved marshmallows. It was my own story of roasting marshmallows over a candle in my tiny apartment that led to her revelation. The stories we shared highlighted our differences, but more often, our similarities.

The pandemic brought other changes, too. My mom had plenty of time on her hands, so she spent hours organizing our four-bedroom family home, that she now occupied alone. This led to the unearthing of family artifacts and stories, the re-gifting to me of hand-me-down clothing she didn’t wear anymore, and the organizing of all of her old photographs for scanning.

There were over seven hundred photographs remaining after she threw away the duplicates and photos she thought no one else would care about. She was willing to pay to have them scanned, if she could find a good sale price for the service. She had always been thrifty, because she lived on a teacher’s salary, even before her divorce or retirement. To save her money, I offered to handle the smaller, technical details, so she wouldn’t have to pay extra for them. This included rotating the scanned photo files that didn’t come out facing the right direction and saving the photos to multiple travel drives so she could share copies with me and my younger brother, who was raised as an only child.

As a result of our newly emerging friendship, she felt empowered to ask for help with tasks she found to be more challenging, even on a day meant to celebrate me. Today, there were several USB drives waiting on the desk for the photos to be transferred. As I started spot-checking the files, I found a few that were facing the wrong way, and I realized that checking all of them was going to be a longer project than I had planned. Instead, I took a break to prepare the vegetables for roasting.

Together, we chopped broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, sweet potatoes, and onions. I supervised as my mom tossed them in a bowl with olive oil, salt, and pepper, as instructed, being careful to coat them all evenly. We cut so many vegetables that we needed two trays for roasting them. This was planned because we both lived alone and hated cooking, so we made sure to have lots of leftovers between us. A double-batch of brown rice had been soaking in water and was ready to go into the rice cooker with a pat of vegan butter. Once everything was cooking, I returned to the office to finish the photo transfer.

There were pictures of my mom and her siblings as children with their family, pictures of my parents as newlyweds, and of me and my brother as babies. I came across a picture of me riding a horse with my dad when I was about four years old. I didn’t recognize the horse, which was odd for me because I was always closest to the animals. I called to my mom in the kitchen, “I don’t remember this white horse, do you?” She came in from the hallway and stared at the screen for a few moments and then said, “No, not that one.” Then, she added, “I had a white horse at one point, but you were already out of the house by then.” There was an awkward moment of silence and then she scurried quickly out of the room.

My brain was stuck on “you were already out of the house.” As an adult, my best friend and only true family member was a white horse named Tux. He was with me for twenty of his twenty-seven years. He was unquestionably the best part of my life during those years, and I wouldn’t have survived them without his constant love and presence. The question I kept asking myself now was “How did I not know about her white horse?”

This was not the first time in the last few months that the mention of a horse sent me down a rabbit hole of dark thoughts. When I was younger, my mom had purchased a horse off the race track that she was afraid to ride. He scared easily and would jump and spin at anything unexpected, and she would fall off or let go on purpose. She had gotten hurt several times from bailing out in his moment of anxiety. She called him crazy, which is probably why I loved him. I spent several years training him, and getting bucked off and thrown in the dirt repeatedly, until he worked all of the fear out of his body and finally felt trust. When I moved out, I offered to buy him from my mom, but she said he was the best horse she had ever owned, and she couldn’t let him go.

In this new era of pandemic honesty, she had mentioned one day in passing that after I was gone she sold the horse to a stranger. She said the new owner tried to give him back after the sale, but she refused. Hearing that story, I struggled to hide my grief over the many years I longed for that little horse after working so hard to earn his confidence, and for the love and care I would have shown him if he had been given his freedom to spend his life with me, even for a price. I was sure she had sold him for less than what I had offered her. The betrayal was staggering, and not knowing what happened to him after that time was a horror in which I could not allow myself to dwell.

After writhing in my thoughts for a few minutes, I took a deep breath and resumed my task. Pictures scrolled by of me and my best friend in kindergarten, me with my newborn baby brother in his Mickey Mouse t-shirt, the two of us as kids bundled up in the snow, my sixteenth birthday, and my high school graduation. I smiled repeatedly, remembering these moments, moving quickly from image to image.

Then, it happened. I came to a group of photographs that I didn’t recognize - a family trip to Old Faithful Geyser in Yellowstone Park, my brother posing for pictures by the canals in Italy, my mom on a white horse. Photo after photo passed by of places I had never seen and people I didn’t know. It hit me unexpectedly. These were the years I didn’t exist.

I stopped clicking, and my eyes filled with tears. My mom called out from the kitchen, “How long do the veggies need to cook?” I didn’t answer right away. “Should we check them?” she called again. This time, I responded quickly, before she decided to come looking for me. I took a deep breath trying to sound normal. “Be right there.” I dried my face with my sleeve, as I scrolled quickly through the rest of the photographs and copied the folder over to the new drives, as I had promised. I reminded myself over and over again, “That was the past. It is not now. Now is different… better.”

I swallowed my sadness and emerged into the kitchen. Dinner was ready and the house smelled amazing! As I pulled the pans out of the oven, I announced, “I finished fixing all of the photos and saved them to the disks. They’re on your desk.” My mom was elated. As we ate dinner together, she raised her glass of wine and cheered, “This was the best day ever!”

I drove home in silence, hugged my cats in the warmth of my electric fireplace, and cried.