No Pictures Of Me As A Youth

Something profound Mother asked me over dinner last night: "Why don't I have pictures of you when you was young?"

In her office there are pictures of us kids when we were young.  Did all of you guys have their pictures taken every year at school when you were young?  It's one of the ties that binds all of us Americans.  Anyway, I had noticed that she had tacked all these photos onto her wall.  She has my brother's, and my sister's.  But not mine.  Why is that?

I remember having a lot of angst come picture time.  I had looked forward to my picking out what package of small and large photos I wanted my parents to buy me.  But I think they hated that because they thought it was a waste of money.  However, there is another aspect to this that I've buried for a long time: I had stick-up hair.  I had, like, the shittiest hair -- and in fact I still do, all standing erect, like I have a million tiny black boners on top of my head.  But it was even worse in elementary school.  Seriously, the length of my hair before I cut it was almost as long as my face.  Combing it didn't help, although the fact that I didn't really do anything to lay it down also didn't help.

Can't reconcile how I looked forward to buying my photos with this, but at some point I dreaded Picture Day.  Probably started shortly after my brother and classmates made fun of me.  So I don't know what happened to any pictures that I bought.  Could be that I listened to my folks and didn't buy any.  Or, I hated seeing my face, punctuated by a non-smile that conveyed fear and sadness at what the world was going to see encased for all-time, staring back at me and I either hid it or threw it away.  Either way I did not wonder about where my pictures went as I got older.

It seems so small now.  I want Mother to have photos of me as a kid taken at school, even with my Stick-Up Hair.  But it's gone now, permanently.  Seeing my siblings' pictures on Mother's office wall and not mine drives home another wedge between me and my brother and sister.  I've felt it all along.  What I still am reckoning is whether this divide real or something I decided to create.