The Lie Behind the Shutter Click

CW: Suicide, Drugs, Mental Health.

Summer camps with my girl scout troop, trips to theme parks and birthday parties. Man, I haven’t seen these photos for years. All of these faces, once so familiar- now total strangers. Everyone looks so happy. Are they? The old adage “a photo is worth a thousand words” is up for debate, I believe. Does a photo really replace a thousand words, and if so, who’s story are they telling? Every photo attempts to depict this perfect little life, wrapped in a pretty box with a stupid fucking bow. They say that hindsight is 20-20, whoever the hell “they” are. As an adult flipping through the timeline of my life, encapsulated within cracked and crumbling cellophane pages, bound together with a faded, brown cardboard cover, I begin to remember all of these smiling faces and I begin to understand the dark truth behind everyone’s grin. You see, the eyes are the window to the soul, and what the smiles hide, the eyes are sure to reveal. The eyes reveal the lies, manipulation, entrapment and death that the smiles weakly attempt to obscure. It’s almost sickening how many faces abuse really has. Wait a minute, this is a family photo album and I’m talking about abuse? Yeah, I guess we’re ripping this band-aid off.

Death takes its toll on everyone a little differently. Some people follow the five stages of grief as if they are reading a textbook on grieving. Some people choose to numb themselves to the pain and dive into work or drugs or sex and lose themselves so they don’t have to feel anything real. Some become bitter, and like a plague sweeping through a 14th century English village, blacken everything that dare encounter them. Speaking of the black plague, I flip to a photo of my dad, my grandma and I on the Grand Canyon Skywalk the year it opened. We all look so happy, but Grandma was and is so goddamn bitter. I mean, I kind of get it- she lost her second born son in a freak accident when he crashed his plane into a tower in Alaska during a blizzard. Yeah, you read that right. I am confident that would fuck anybody up. My uncle died in June of 1997, just before I turned three. His death shook Grandma to her core, and rightfully so. I live by the saying “Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you react.” Suffice it to say, Grandma didn’t react so well, and I am the very product of that reaction. 

My grandparents “took over care of me”, so I was told, very soon after my uncles accident. The accident that had literally nothing to do with my mom or I, it was my dads brother. My mother was given an impossible ultimatum. “Let me raise her or I’m going to kill myself.” My own dad didn’t even want me that much, and this forced my mom into a corner with only one way out- so she conceded and allowed my bitter, narcissistic, manipulative grandmother to raise me, If you can even call it that. As more time-stained, creaky plastic pages turn, we come to Easter of 2003. Look how happy I am holding my shiny new walkman cd player, another in the long line of gifts and experiences (that were really just pacifiers- remember the Grand Canyon?) given to me in attempt to make up for her subtle abuse. My uncle dying made her feel like she had lost all control, spiraling into a self-servicing and self-destructing symphony of micromanaging every move, controlling every aspect of mine and everyone else’s life. She needed help, serious help, and back then, mental health was a four-letter word. So, no one said anything. She said jump, everyone asked “How high?” Soon we all became completely trapped and powerless. 

In this ever-evolving age of digital storage and nothing being tangible anymore, there is almost no sound more nostalgic and gross to me than sticky photo pages being peeled apart. Here I am on the sidewalk with my chorus teacher from my school in Vegas. We are gearing up and loading the bus to go on a field trip to an amusement park back home in California.- and I am pumped. See, my teachers smile is genuine. To my knowledge, he wasn’t hiding anything, he wasn’t abusive, he was a kick-ass dude. I loved being in chorus. I had always wanted to sing professionally, but voice lessons became another string my grandmother used to pluck to manipulate me. “We’ll get you voice lessons if you move with us to Indiana!” I can hear her voice as clearly now as I did back then… and I still shudder at the sound, even if it’s only a memory. My smile however, is genuine but I can see the pain I’m covering, and I remember it a little too well. Looking back I realize I knew something was wrong, I just didn’t know what. Nevertheless, I was happy to go back to Cali; I missed my home. I still miss my home. We moved to Vegas a year prior for some job my dad got, while my mom and step-dad stayed in California. 

Ahhh, the obligatory empty pages, graves of memories I chose to forget. These pages once held photos I have since burned, turning the demons of painful memories into mere ash. These pages represent kind of a blank period in my life. Once we moved to Vegas, at 12 years old I realized that I was being silently, subtly and effectively manipulated against and away from my mom. I then began putting together so many pieces, realizing just how long this had been going on. Grandma’s manipulation completely shifted and fractured my relationship with my mom, which is what she wanted. What she didn’t plan for was that by her own doing, she was her own collateral damage, and the symphony she was so carefully conducting crescendoed with me hating her as well. Being in Sin City, I turned to a life of sin. When in Rome, right? I fell into drugs before I was in my teens, trying to find something to lose myself in so I didn’t have to feel anything real, or face the music of what was happening in my life. I know what you’re thinking, super healthy, right?

Moving on, we arrive at photo from 2008 of our beautiful early 1900s farm house in Southern Indiana. Yes, I bought the empty promise of voice lessons hook, line and sinker. I was thirteen, what do you want from me? I lost myself in the walls of this house. Damn near everyone on my dad’s side of the family lived in this house. Grandma, Grandpa, Dad, my aunt, her third husband, my infant nephew. (The miracle, rainbow baby named after my dead uncle. Poor kid never stood a chance) The only ones truly on my side were my two best friends, my 120 pound Rottweiler, Moses and my little “Benji” dog, Turbo. I remember so many nights sitting on the roof outside of my room on the second floor looking at the stars, missing my family who was just inside the house. They were there, but they really weren’t. The one’s that weren’t bitter were, like me, marionettes being controlled. Some of my best friends that I have today sat on that roof with me so many years ago. Those photos I cherish. 

The further along in the album I get, the fewer photos of my dad I come across. He kind of vanished when we moved to Indiana. He lived with us, then he didn’t. Then he moved in with his girlfriend and I didn’t. Any chance at freedom he was going to take. I can’t entirely blame him, Grandma raised him too. He lived close enough that he would visit occasionally, but almost overnight he went from being dad-ish to being an awkward older brother coming home for dinner and rough-housing with his kid sister. I was noticeably unhinged at this point- in a period of three years I moved from the Inland Empire to Las Freaking Vegas, to southern Indiana corn country, where they had “DRIVE YOUR TRACTOR TO SCHOOL DAY!” Hello! Culture shock! Of course I was unhinged. Yet, he didn’t notice and he left me there, alone, just like the loose pocket change and trash on the floor of what was once his bedroom. 

Once again, hindsight steps in and I realize that Dad and I shared some of the same struggles. His solution was to turn a blind-eye, hoping the problem would just fix itself. Typical dude response. Like all wounds that go untreated, it cleared up quickly and all was well! JK, things festered and got infected. (This of course is a hyperbole for my (thankfully, failed) first (ouch) suicide attempt, and led to me being an adult who lives a life her dad is not a part of.) Infections need antibiotics, and I called my mom (who moved to North Carolina) for a prescription. I desperately needed a change. I had to get clean and get my life back. I needed to get away from my grandparents, the people who raised me, the people who didn’t notice the maelstrom that my life had become. I had no choice but to leave the only family I’d ever really known, or thought I knew. 

I turn the page in my album and literally turn a page in my life. These faces in the photos again look so happy like they’ve got it together, but again, who’s story are they telling? Growing up in a split home, I always bounced back-and-forth between two of four different states, so I was used to transitioning. My mom’s house, however, had my step-dad, and my step-dad had strict rules and structure. I was fourteen, and had been through enough shit at this point to have the self-awareness to know that I seriously needed strict rules and structure. I was pining for a change and thats why I was there. I quickly came to learn that with that change came strings, much like the ones I tried so hard to cut in Indiana. Turns out, my Bubonic grandmother had gotten to mom too. Damn, manipulation runs deep, and Grandma all but shattered any hope of Mom and I ever having a healthy relationship. After fifteen years I’ve pretty much accepted it never will be. Looking through the carefully posed photos from Mom’s, its very clear that I was the outsider, the red-headed step-child if you will. Though they attempted to make me feel welcome and give me a sense of belonging, it became clearer over time that the malicious intentions of my grandmother carried more weight than my moms own guilt for giving up on me. She had a new family, new kids, and I can’t even really call them my siblings. 

Oh Jesus, there’s my prom photo. It isn’t embarrassing, my best friend was my date and we are hella cute! I was jealous because his hair was quite a bit longer than mine. Another well intentioned friend became worried and told a school counselor about my depression and suicidal thoughts- this also happened in Indiana before I left. I know, super healthy. In my defense, I was clearly sending a cry-for-help, that no one picked up. The school called my parents, and blah blah blah, nothing was done, other than my mom telling me I was attention seeking and threatening to put me on “crazy pills like your sister”. Thanks, Mom. 

Family photos got replaced with friends and parties and stupid teenagers doing stupid teenager things at the mall, and photos of my first house! In 2013 I moved out on my own for the first time. The string here was I had to let my autistic older sister, who really enjoyed trying to kill me, move in with me. Regardless, I felt empowered finally being on my own. Being on my own, meant I was slapped with the harsh reality that I had developed a slight alcohol problem. Ok, fine, I was a damn alcoholic before I was legal. Are ya happy now? I’m now laughing at snapshots from my epic halloween party my first year on my own. I don’t remember the party. My mom taught me how to be responsible with alcohol. Did I listen? Yes. Did I become an alcoholic anyway? Double yes. Did anyone notice? Fuck no, and if they did no one said a damn thing. It’s hard to look back at all my self-sabotage (wonder who I inherited that trait from?) I thought I had it made back then. I clearly did not. 

Since then, so much has changed. So many photos and memories lost; some forgotten, others burned. Today, my photo album is everything I thought it was when I was a kid. Happy, loving, honest, open, real. Looking back I see brokenness and lies and pain. Looking forward I see hope. I have an amazing, unconventional family, that I CHOSE. I always heard “blood is thicker than water”. The actual saying is “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.” There is infinitely more love in the family that I built than in the one I was born into. I’m now a married mother of a beautiful five year old girl, who is my pride and joy. I welcomed another man and his son into my home with my family. We may not be traditional, but this is the most stable, most supportive, most secure family I’ve ever had. 

I have learned that to understand your happiness, you first must understand your sorrow, and know how you got there. Going through photos is one thing, healing old wounds is another thing entirely. I decided I needed to take an actual stroll down memory lane. So, we packed the kids in the car, bought a tent and drove from the East Coast back to the West Coast- where my life began, and ended in a sense. I set out to replace as many negative memories from these places with with happy ones, to drive the same roads and breathe the same air I grew up with. Showing my kids the “houses that built me” was such an empowering experience, and may have finally given me the change I had been pining for for so long. 

At this point (I hope) you’re wondering about my recent photo album. It is filled with new photos of all of the places I called home, and a ton of other states. It is filled with genuine, happy photos of my husbands, my kids, our dogs, and our amazing life. I am proud to look back at these photos and know that I give my kids the experience of being more well-traveled than many adults, but I do it because I really love my kids. I show them how big and vast and amazing this country is. I show them that promises need to be kept, and because I was lied to, I always tell them the truth. I show them that reactions are more important than tragedies. My bad memories are now overwritten with new, good memories with the family I chose and built for myself.

A photo my be worth a thousand words, but how many of those words are telling the truth?