Duality

Bug's great aunt has a birthday today. Last week, we pulled out scrapbooks to look at photos of this long-forgotten relative in order to entice him to make her a card. As we paged through the album, he was transfixed by the photos. Far-away cousins, long-ago trips to the beach. . . For him, these were ancient relics. He wanted to hear each and every story, at least until he was bored and it was back to legos.

I was never an avid scrapbooker like some of my friends, but I managed to paste a few decent pages together to track our family's quiet adventures. We have wedding books, a pregnancy album, a first-year book, and a Colorado volume. Then, the albums stop cold. I had completed four or five pages for our Adirondack chapter by this time last year. That was when everything changed. Please don't blame me for not wanting to chronicle the giant yard sale we held on Lake George to sell most of our earthly possessions. And I will not apologize for not including a photo of my grandmother's piano - the one I had played as a child in Oklahoma and had to leave behind in our camp house for the next resident. Letting the scrapbooks go dormant for a while was a wise move.

However, the intervening year has not been all neglect and misery. Bug and I have had a number of photo-worthy excursions. Yesterday, I began to compile those pictures onto a memory card for printing. Pulling them from blackberry, camera, and random computer folders was the perfect activity for the lazy end of a sick day. Sorting images was more healing than a bubble bath. It is hard to believe, looking at the visual evidence before me, that this year has really been the toughest on record. Somehow, we keep managing to play. We keep cultivating joy.

A file folder of Tee's photos somehow made it onto my computer. They are as recent as January 2011, so he must have downloaded them to give my folks a slide show after returning from a winter vacation trip with Bug. I scanned through dozen of snow-fun shots filled with people I don't know enjoying a holiday I was not a part of. These photos are only a fraction of the collection Tee is undoubtedly amassing. He has always been fonder of the camera than I.

When a family splits apart, memories become as fractured as home life. I doubt Tee will create an album of his photos. He has never been the crafty type. The scrapbooks I create will tell the story of my son and me, his maternal grandparents, our dog. This one-sided, cobbled-together family will have its chronicle. The history of the other half of his life will have to exist on some other plane. I cannot tell Bug that narrative as he grows. Somehow, he will have to find a place to store his bifurcated memories on his own. He will not have the help of a sibling or parents who share his whole history.

When my boy hops between our houses, he always carries something with him. He packs a little bag of his markers or stuffs a lego plane he has crafted into a purse. His four-year-old need for continuity manifests in his toys. Tee and I let Bug's possessions migrate freely. Yet neither of us can hold the other parent's perspective, and no one has yet invented a bag that can hold memories.

Before today, I had never considered how much it has meant to me to have a set of photo albums in my basement showing our intact (though tumultuous) family life moving along together over the years. My mother stopped assembling these books at some point in my early adolescence. However, I could always - in fact, still do - return to them to see myself in the context of a mostly unchanging circle of kin. This is the way I rooted myself in a history. As a grown child now, I can speak to my parents about an early apartment we lived in or a beach vacation we took, and I can hear the pieces of their accounts echoing off one another, creating a kind of odd harmony. Even in my adulthood, this re-telling of shared experience is a great comfort.

Knowing I cannot give that to my son breaks my heart. For now, his dad and I live close enough to one another to create some overlap. Two nights ago, Tee came over and stayed for dinner while I was upstairs with the flu. Sharing small moments in each other's houses, attending family nights at preschool, and enjoying the occasional lunch together are all fine things to do. They will not, however inoculate Bug against growing pains as our two lives mature separately. In the not-too-distant future, we may be in two new relationships, creating separate families, negotiating moves far from one another. How any child survives such tectonic shifts is beyond me. Yet, children do survive. Some even thrive.

Today, the best I can do for my boy is compile a few photos to create a loving history in which my son can find himself. It's a long way from here to scrapbook page, I know. I am, after all, a working mom now. I don't expect to have anything compiled before 2012. One small step at a time.

Bug's life may not have a single narrative. Whose life does, really? My son will, however, have one account of his childhood lovingly told, and always available to him. I may not be able to control the outcome of this change in our family, but I am a mother. And that means I have considerable power to bring resilience, imagination, and hope to the story we write together.