Life After Mother: Home for Christmas

My family’s first Christmas in the home that’s now mine — the first Christmas ever in this particular suburban home, when it was newly built — is preserved in photos taken for my father’s company newsletter. My parents and I sit in our living room while my father shows off his master’s degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Southern California, obtained through a work-study program arranged by his employer North American Aviation (which, through a series of sales and mergers, eventually morphed into Rockwell International, and then became Boeing).

When I look at these photos now, I see time-capsule documentation of beginnings — the beginning of a family, a home, a career or two or three, and that first Christmas in our new home. I can tell when the photos were taken because my father’s degree is dated 1959, the year we moved in when I was a preschooler. I can tell it was Christmas because of the Christmas decorations.

I can see how the house has changed, and how it has not. The hardwood floor, wood-paneled wall, the brick hearth, all look the same. The windows look the same, although shutters have replaced the window shades. Long gone are the black-and-white TV we watched well into the 1970s, the chair my mother’s sitting in, and the card table my father took with him in the divorce. The bamboo lamps, though, that my father so proudly hand-crafted and so much later took with him in the divorce — I inherited them, and they’re now back in the living room. 

As with so many photos that show families that, from all outward appearances, are happy, there’s no evidence of the dysfunction that lurked beneath the surface and eventually caused my family to disintegrate. As the years passed we couldn’t be that family that welcomed our relatives and friends to share our holiday traditions every year. In our later years, we hardly even sent cards and gifts to each other. Even holiday dinners with my mother became more of a chore than joy as her health, and mine worsened.  

Of the three people in those photos, I’m the only one left. Every year the holiday season represents a new beginning for me, and I remind myself how all those Christmases past are past. Look at the pictures again, look closely, and behind my father’s head, you’ll see evidence of a little artificial tree. My mother had that tree in her Seattle apartment, so she’d have a tree at Christmas, back before she married my father. It’s still packed away in what’s become my garage. When Christmas comes around, I put it in the living room.