blues

I am making a scrapbook for my son. NO it isn't a fluffy little thing with stick-on hearts and flowers. It is sturdy and will need to be to keep the wild dogs at bay. It is chock full of memories, bursting at the seams, layers of yellow tape on some of the pictures I can't quite bear to part with.

Thank god for Kinko's.

I peer down these alleyways, hoping the landmines are fewer and farther apart, praying I won't step in the same holes, but remorse is strong and photographs DO lie, contrary to popular opinion. The happy Christmas mornings of nearly thirty years ago are beautiful seen through my son's wide almond eyes, but it was not a safe place, his childhood, and there are some pictures, him standing with a group of other children gathered around Santa, and his smile is tentative, uncertain, as though he is only playing at being a child, knowing there were more important things to attend to, and where is his mother and is his father still alive?

And the pictures, always of the father holding the son, proof of love, proof of presence, and he was not was not was not. And all my years in therapy melt away and I am an angry young mother whose eight year old son is still sitting on the porch on his sleeping bag long after dark waiting for a father who will not arrive.

And I prayed it. Not for my satisfaction but for his safety. Please God don't let him show up.

So it gets heavy in my heart and it will be good to release these pictures to his son, and he can separate truth from fantasy. And he can have his fantasies. His father is dead. I can offer him that much.

It is Sunday night, my husband playing his acoustic guitar, my fingers clicking a percussion to these blues.