That school photo is haunting. Did you notice, too, that she's the only one in the photo not looking at the camera, the opposite of what's happening in that famous tennis court scene in Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train"? There's something very telling about her avoidance of the camera, which I read as a hope that if I don't see it, it can't see me and I won't really exist in the public world that that camera represents. I can't help wondering what sort of parallelism there might be between your mother's avoidance/denial of the other's gaze in that photo, and your avoidance/past denial of your childhood traumas in your history as a researcher and writer, a wish not to exist in the eyes of some oppressive other whose expectations are unwanted obligations or prisons of some sort. The avoidance of the other's gaze seems less an effort to deny the other's existence than an attempt to escape the other's inspection, through which your public face could be revealed as a false front.
The what if game got the ball rolling here....loved what you've written as to their backstories and how you slid into your own bubble and point out the fact it was right above your mother in the den.
That school photo is haunting. Did you notice, too, that she's the only one in the photo not looking at the camera, the opposite of what's happening in that famous tennis court scene in Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train"? There's something very telling about her avoidance of the camera, which I read as a hope that if I don't see it, it can't see me and I won't really exist in the public world that that camera represents. I can't help wondering what sort of parallelism there might be between your mother's avoidance/denial of the other's gaze in that photo, and your avoidance/past denial of your childhood traumas in your history as a researcher and writer, a wish not to exist in the eyes of some oppressive other whose expectations are unwanted obligations or prisons of some sort. The avoidance of the other's gaze seems less an effort to deny the other's existence than an attempt to escape the other's inspection, through which your public face could be revealed as a false front.
The what if game got the ball rolling here....loved what you've written as to their backstories and how you slid into your own bubble and point out the fact it was right above your mother in the den.