View from the North 40: A picture-perfect dysfunctional family

My mom and her three sisters are — let’s say “quirky” just in case one of them gets her hands on this column.

All four of the women are different, though I won't elaborate on their characters because I value my life. But all four have one common characteristic: They have spent their entire lives, consciously and subconsciously, in search of themselves, wondering constantly “who am I?”

No one taught them when they were little — and their minds were big — useful cliches like: “wherever you are, that’s where you’re at,” and “you are what you do,” so they cannot believe these messages as adults. And it explains the photos.

Recently my Aunt Frances, my favorite and I don’t mind admitting that, sent me a card with a little handful of black and white photos of my mother at varying ages and one of my dad when he was 20 or so. This seems sweet, right? And it was.

But this is my quirky, hippy-country aunt, so there was some strangeness in proportion: All the photos were cut up — a human form cut away, or only a half or a small slice of a photo.

See, Aunt Frances’ life-long journey to herself has taken her through every self-help book, article or TV program you know, some you've never heard of. She has been to therapy and group sessions. And she has taken creative forays to the self in art classes of every ilk, masseuse school, meditation, crafting, religious sojourns, retreats and more.

She would be the one to hear about a two-night “expression through acting” class, show up in a plaid Western shirt, jeans and lace-up packer boots for an opportunity to find herself while acting like a cat with peanut butter stuck to the roof of its mouth.

“Really work it!” the instructor would say. And she would. And then the instructor would say “Now you still have peanut butter mouth, but a mouse bit the cat’s tail. What do you do?!” And she would make that really work, too.

Then, surely, the spirit would move her to break into an interpretive dance, packers and all.

But meanwhile, back at the photos. The note accompanying the photos said that her latest effort to find herself required that she place photos of herself to the surface of every point in her house where she frequently looks, stops or spends time. That means photos of little Frances were plastered to her bathroom mirror, fridge, car visor, clock faces — you get the picture. Sorry, couldn’t help myself with the pun.

The point of the exercise was to get in touch with her inner child to understand her inner adult. Of course, she logicked, she didn’t want to get in touch with someone else’s inner child, so she cut herself out of all the photos, some of them taken 50 or more years before she did that, and mailed the rest out to people she thought might like them.

For example, my cousin Katie, the high-brow sisters’ daughter, got the left portion of a photo with her little girl mother standing against an old farmhouse. I got the right side of the photo with my grade-school-aged mother sitting on the front step of the old farmhouse, staring at the camera and pasture land stretching off into the distance.

I wonder sometimes if the other sister girls were smiling. I wonder if adult aunt ever found the map or compass or sextant to herself in the girl image. I wonder, too, if my cousin ever wishes, like I do, that our aunt had scanned the photos in their original condition and cut up the copies rather than the originals like an impulsive nut-job then shipped the oddments to loved ones to enjoy ... and wonder about.

But, I remember, you are what you do, so she did and she is. And ya gotta love her for it.

(I think I need to make a phone call this weekend from [email protected].)