Photos of a fractured family.

I’ve been going through old photos lately, trying to organize them in some way and collect my favorites for various art projects and personal use. It’s been difficult, though, finding the ones I’m looking for and figuring out when the ones I can find were taken — most of them are thrown together in containers, undated and unorganized with chunks of time missing in between sets of pictures.

It’s interesting how we date photos when we’re unsure of when they were taken. There’s age estimation (if my little brother was just born, it was around 1993 or 1994); clothing style (as in what was my mother thinking when she put that on?); hairstyle (I haven’t cut my hair short in years); location (the Bahamas vacation was in 1997, the Virginia vacation a few years later…); and unfortunately, in my family, the most helpful of all is our timeline of family drama. The sudden absence of my mother’s side of the family occurs circa winter 1996, the reappearance of my grandma marks the year my grandpa died in 2001, and my aunt and cousins make their way into our lives in 2003, the year my uncle died. Shortly after that, another feud, and my grandma, aunts, uncle and cousins once again disappear from our photographs.

When my grandma died earlier this summer, my family made sure to include my brothers and me in the services, despite the tension with my mother that has caused us to remain estranged from the family for a number of years. I can’t even begin to express how grateful I am for that. Even so, the pictures at my grandma’s wake managed to tell the story well enough — there were pictures of our cousins at all ages up until now, but I cease to exist along with my brothers about eight years ago.

It’s more complicated than that, of course, and far too complex for anyone in my family to even understand well enough to explain, but the point is that we (my mother, my brothers and I) have been relatively close with certain family members at various points of our lives, and not on speaking terms at all at other points in our lives. To be honest, it’s probably not a great idea for me to even write about this online. I’ve gotten in trouble for things I’ve written about my family in the past — that is, during the times when we actually were speaking to them — but the truth is that I’m still dealing with a lot of complicated emotions when it comes to this. Anytime I ever said anything even remotely negative about my family, it was a cry for attention from people I was conditioned to hate — and though I never did hate them, I certainly had a lot of misplaced anger combined with feelings of abandonment and guilt over something that was never my fault.

That’s where my attachment to these pictures comes in. They’re not just about my memories; they’re about my idealizations, my long-standing desperation for a normal relationship with my family, my attachment issues in general, and my fear of being unstable. Growing up, I always clung to memories of old times in hopes that I had the power to fix my family and restore it to the way we were. You couldn’t call it perfection, obviously — years of silence don’t begin out of nowhere — but it certainly wasn’t anything like this. And it’s something I still remember fondly, in spite of everything.

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