Bittersweet

That's a nice word, bittersweet. It's the feeling I've had today, scanning old photo slides so that my kids can have the pictures Chuck & I took way back when. I'd started out feeling rather sad, as I have before when doing this, but I've decided to focus on the sweet part. We were a happy family, multiple-degreed spouses with two beautiful, truly gorgeous little girls. We were Yuppies with a capital Y. The girls are still lovely, the degrees are still there; we're just not that family anymore. But oh, my, were we pretty. (I'd put a photo of the four of us but I haven't scanned in all the pictures yet, so this one of the three of us will have to do.) Here we are in 1980, not too long after moving to Plattsburgh, and well before the coldest winter on record in this area (I'm pretty sure that record is still holding, too). Look how young I was, how small the girls.

I have loved being a mother more than anything. I liked being a librarian and it does suit my mild to moderate OCD rather well, but I probably should have opted to be a stay-at-home mom. Except for going crazy because I would have had no adults to talk to--and that lunacy would probably not have reached the involuntary-commitment level until the girls were high schoolers, when every mother is allowed certifiable madness--I actually was Martha Stewart. I just didn't have the modelling career that led to the connections. I guess, to be honest, what I really lacked was the level of gottawanna that it would have taken to build that empire. (The same could be said of my acting career, or lack thereof.) My daughters make me sooo proud, though, that not being Martha is acceptable. I was about as much Martha as anyone in my family could tolerate, I'm sure!

To look at those photos is to push myself back into a life that hardly seems real anymore. (I'm determined to find a 4-List photo. There'll be one here before the end of this post.

NO! The photo here is my youngest sister and her husband trying to claim parenthood of MY daughters. It won't work now anymore than it did back then!)

Being a grandmother, something I couldn't comprehend in those early years, I get to watch myself doing it again. I'm not saying that my daughter parents like I did. Good grief, we had NO money and I was a real make-do mom. But to watch her and her husband worry and love and care for their girls is more like watching myself than I imagined. I like it. And because I have few regrets about how I mothered, I'm fine with Emily picking and choosing the parts of mine that she uses. And whether she knows it or not, there are some that I see! But they're probably mothering styles that everyone uses so who's to say it's me she learned 'em from.

So I look at the pictures of young Carla and young Chuck and those baby girls. I remember the incidents that have been memorialized in stories that we've told throughout their lives. What else? Emily's girls brought back the smells of mothering and some (!) of those are nice. And the baby/toddler voices are a thrill to hear, to try to hear my own tiny voices again. But the photos are still awfully good to remind me how much fun it was to have kids.

Okay, okay. So here are not one, but two photos of the whole List family taken in 1979. The first was taken in spring--maybe around Easter? And I don't want to hear anything about my glasses! They were in style back then!


For more viewing pleasure, the photo here was taken on Mother's Day, 1979. The family was complete: Chuck 28, Emily 23 months, Carla 30, Jenny 3-1/2 months.


I'll do more photos in the near future. Check Facebook too, because I may post a few there.