Mother Before
Mina Leazer
​
I once asked my mother very pointedly, “Do you think we would have been friends in high school?” I, myself, was in high school at the time, and I had been leafing through some of her old black and white photos, something I do with regular but sparse intervals. Without hesitation, she said, “No.” I know that when I run this story by my mother at some later point, she will provide some greater context, and even if there was more she said after this two-letter response, I do not remember it. It wasn’t the shock of her saying it that stunned me; it was because she verbalized in my heart what I knew to be true.
Now before you misconstrue the story,
my mother and I are deeply connected. We are connected in ways my husband finds both amusing and incredibly frustrating. Despite my best attempts at deviation, I am the carbon copy of my mother—the old-school kind where white, pink, and yellow pages are stacked just so and held together with perforation so that the third yellow carbon copy retains an imperfect palimpsest of the original white copy—not close enough to call them duplicates, but with enough verisimilitude that you could demand your money back on an old vacuum cleaner that didn’t hold up its end of the bargain.
My mother was, and continues to be, a striking woman. When I inadvertently hold my goofy, slack-jawed, upward-turned head for a photo, it is decidedly a shift from my mother’s chin-lowered, close-lipped glower, daring the old black and white film camera to retain any distortion from the image she is projecting. I recognize it most in her group photos. She always has such an intense look; she stands slightly apart, she is erect and perfectly poised. Later, when I scanned some of her old photos to my computer, I noticed that very few of these made it into my personal collection. Since I’m not often home to sift through her old photos, it’s interesting how my selection is starting to soften the image I first encountered as a teenager.
​
There is this wonderful project on Instagram called “Mothers Before” where the site organizer asked people, predominantly women, to share pictures of their mothers before they were
mothers. Accompanying each photo is an inevitable anecdote or caption, but so many of these images speak
for themselves. They whisper from the page with girlish abandon, carefreeness, hope. For some reason, it makes me sad to think that the fates of the free spirits on this page are sealed. We all know now exactly who they’ve become, and I live in the tension of wondering whether their lives lived up to all they were imagining, in that moment when they were captured.
Frustratingly enough—although we knew this when we submitted—we can no longer see the comments or captions on our individual submissions. As all good capitalist projects go, the creators have collated them into a book that you must now buy in order to read. I can
see the photo I submitted and how many likes it has received, but still, it is disappointing.
Still, I wonder what I was thinking
when I submitted this photo. Up until that point, I had noticed that most of the submissions were of white mothers, so I think I subconsciously submitted a photo with lots of context to make sure that this photo was taken in another country.
In the photo, she is pointing her camera at a subject which is out of frame, and someone is pointing their camera at her. School boys are playing in the background, standing in distinct groups in matching school uniforms meant for play, except for one boy who is inexplicably wearing a striped shirt. Uniformity was a must in Korean culture and obedience was du jour.
Her lips are still closed, perhaps just with the exertion of effort in focusing, but her mouth is in a slight smile. Her legs are together, and the camera-facing one is aptly bent to give a hint of flirtation if only with the camera, but she is so pleasantly poised that I wonder if this photo was posed. You didn’t get endless retakes in the days of film photography, and one-hour process labs were not a feature of the late ‘60s in Korea.
I do find it interesting that I chose a photo where my mom is not looking at the camera, but rather standing behind it. She is on the recess grounds, most likely at the school where she was teaching, an all-boys school with a penchant for mischief. She taught art there. Once during her art history lesson, the boys inserted slides of naked penises into the presentation in rapid succession (which if I may mention is such an artful prank for school-aged boys). When the slides appeared during the lecture unbeknownst to my mother, the classroom of sixty boys erupted in laughter, and my mother, being one not to be shaken, looked straight into the audience and began to lecture about depictions of the human body in art as if she had planned this the entire time. The boys who had been laughing began to whisper to one another, probably about the chul (think chutzpah) of their teacher, and before class was over, they began to take notes. My mother was not one to let a lesson go.
​
And it is in this moment that I wonder who my mother is. Why I couldn’t have been friends with her. Whether or not I would
have gone up to her in that playground. Why I chose this as the public representation of my mother, before. It may best have to do with a poem I wrote about her once in high school. It must have been after a disagreement, and it is nestled
in a composition notebook where I
used to write song lyrics and the
occasional vengeful poetry. This one is more serene than the other ones, and I wonder if it was the moment of reckoning—a final resignation to this understanding that I may never
understand my mother, but somehow, that is going to be ok.
Mina Leazer (she/her) is a career educator and newly-minted librarian. She has taught ESL and French for 20 years to all age groups and on three continents. She is currently a proud NYC public school educator and lives with her husband and their two cats, Alistair and Saoirse.