Glimpses of Sharon

This is the first picture in my family's oldest photo album. It's my mother in late 1975.

I've seen this Polaroid more times than I can count, dating back to the earliest reaches of my memory. I loved looking through the albums as a child. I studied them so many times that my brain simplified the details. That is a picture of my mother; that is a picture of my mother decorating a Christmas tree; that is a picture of my mother holding my brother and sister when they were toddlers.

When I asked to borrow these albums to scan them, I wasn't prepared for the minutiae of my family's daily life to spring out at me from the past, somehow sharp and subtle at the same time.

I think she may be wearing a The Wizard of Oz shirt, because I think I can make out the Tin Man and the Scarecrow. I might be mistaken. The woman I know doesn't wear screen tees with pop culture references, but this Sharon Coin does. Maybe she has a coat indoors because, like me, she gets cold easily. I think she's in her army barrack. She may be wearing her dog tags.

She's making a sandwich. And she isn't using a plate. She sets that bread right on the stove. This is definitely not the woman I know. And she's putting mayo on it. For as far back as I can remember, we've never had mayo in the fridge, just Miracle Whip (which is vastly superior). On the shelf above her is a loaf of Wonder Bread, the brand we used all through my childhood in the '80s.

There is another Polaroid on the stove, near the bread. I don't know what it's a picture of, because I've never seen it. It's not in the photo album.

She's only twenty-two, nearly ten years younger than I am. If she were a customer of mine, I'd probably think how young twenty-two years looks to me now.

After I scanned this, I sat studying it for a long while, picking out these details from a time before I existed, examining this face I know so well even though I've never seen it so young, framed by such long, thick hair.

We have the same high forehead, I noticed again. The same jawline when we smile, the same cheeks that pop out. My sister shares that mouth with us; my brother, the forehead. We're all pieces of this beautiful woman who was nearly still a girl, smiling shyly for the camera with her entire life ahead of her.

As I looked through the pictures, things began to stand out to me.

 That's not Mom holding Jeremiah when he was little. That's a woman rapt in the spell of her newborn.

That's not Mom on a couch. That's a woman taking a moment to rest while her little baby naps beside her.

That's not Mom pregnant at Christmastime. That's a woman enjoying the first Christmas she gets to share with a child of her own, with the excitement of another one due in less than a month.

That's my mother, but it's not. It's a small piece of the puzzle, a part that makes up the whole of Sharon. Sometimes I think I know her well, but there's so much more to her than I have any idea. I'm not sure we can ever know our parents completely as a person. But I'm still holding out hope that one day I will.