The cover of my baby album is white with specks of glitter throughout. “It’s a girl!” is emblazoned across the cover. On the first page of this album are my parents’ names, my date of birth, my height and weight, hair and eye color. There are two black imprints of my baby feet with the words “Girl Gay” written above them. I was born at 7:48 in the morning, which is why, I am certain, I am not a morning person. There are blank lines for “exciting memories in baby’s life,” and all of those lines have been filled with my first tiny accomplishments. Apparently I read the alphabet at two and a half years old and could tell time at three. My mother proudly wrote, “Reads almost everything at five years old.” Those are her exact words, written in her neat penmanship, though family lore has me reading the newspaper with my dad about a year and a half before that.
For the first five years of my life, my mother recorded my height and weight. I had a big head that was triangular, something that can happen with the firstborn child. My mother says she spent hours smoothing my newborn head into a rounder shape. There was a record of my birth in the Omaha World-Herald, printed on October 28, 1974, thirteen days after my birthday, and the clipped section of the newspaper is stored in this album alongside my original birth certificate and the little card they put on my bassinet in the hospital. My mother was twenty-five and my father was twenty-seven, so young, but, given the era, not as young as many people were when they started families. My name is spelled correctly on my birth certificate, with one n, and the birth certificate is pink. A nuanced cultural understanding of gender did not exist then—girls were pink and boys were blue and that was that.
In the very first picture of my mother and me together, she is holding me and her jet-black hair is cascading down her back in a thick ponytail. She looks impossibly young and beautiful. I am three days old. This is actually not the first picture of us together. There is a picture of my mom, hugely pregnant with me, wearing a sassy blue minidress and a pair of chunky heels. Her hair is wild and hanging loose down her back. She is leaning against a car, giving a look to the photographer, my father, the kind of intimate look that makes me want to turn away to afford them some privacy. She put this picture in the album even though she is one of the most private people I know. She wanted me to see this gorgeous image, to know she and my father have always loved each other.
These oldest pictures have been in the album so long that they are stuck to the pages. To try and remove the pictures would ruin them.
Every picture of me as an infant with my parents reveals them smiling at me like I am the center of their world. I was. I am. This is part of my truth I know with real clarity—everything good and strong about me starts with my parents, absolutely everything. Almost every picture of me as an infant shows me smiling a smile so infectious that when I look at them I cannot help but smile too. There are happy babies and there are happy babies. I was a happy baby. This is indisputable.
Babies are cute, but they’re pretty useless, my best friend says. They can’t do much for themselves. You have to love them through that uselessness. In the pictures where I am alone, I am being propped up by the arm of a chair, or a few pillows. In one picture, on a hideous, thickly brocaded red couch, I am alone and visibly screaming my head off. There is more than one picture of me screaming my head off. Pictures of screaming babies are hilarious when you know they are pictures of happy babies who are simply having a random fit of baby rage. I look at these baby pictures and think, I look like my niece, but really it is my young niece who looks like me. Family is powerful, no matter what. We’re always tied together with our eyes and our lips and our blood and our bloody hearts. When I was three, my brother Joel was born. There are pictures of him, brown and round, a full head of hair, sitting or standing next to me.
As an adult, I have gone through these albums many times. I have been trying to remember. At first, I looked for pictures to show a child of my own, “This is where you come from,” so when I have that child, she might know her family knows how to love, however imperfectly, so she knows her mother has always been loved and so she may know that she, in turn, will always be loved. It is important to show a child love in many forms, and this is the one good thing I have to offer, no matter how this child comes into my life. I also study the pictures, the people in them; I recall the names and places, the moments that matter, so many of which elude me. I try to piece together the memories I have so carefully erased. I try to make sense of how I went from the child in these perfect photographed moments to who I am today.
I know, precisely, and yet I do not know. I know, but I think what I really want is to understand the why of the distance between then and now. The why is complicated and slippery. I want to be able to hold the why in my hands, to dissect it or tear it apart or burn it and read the ashes even though I am afraid of what I will do with what I see there. I don’t know if such understanding is possible, but when I am alone, I sit and slowly page through these albums obsessively. I want to see what is there and what is missing and what happened even if the why still eludes me.
There is a picture of me. I am five. I have big eyes and a scrawny neck. I am staring at a plastic typewriter while I lie on a couch, on my stomach, ankles crossed, probably daydreaming. I always daydreamed. Even then, I was a writer. From an early age, I would draw little villages on napkins and write stories about the people who lived in those villages. I loved the escape of writing those stories, of imagining lives that were different from my own. I had a ferocious imagination. I was a daydreamer and I resented being pulled out of my daydreams to deal with the business of living. In my stories, I could write myself the friends I did not have. I could make so many things possible that I did not dare imagine for myself. I could be brave. I could be smart. I could be funny. I could be everything I ever wanted. When I wrote, it was so easy to be happy.
There is a picture of me. I am seven; I am happy, wearing overalls. I wore overalls a lot as a kid. I liked them for lots of reasons, but mostly I liked them because they had many pockets where I could hide things and because they were complicated and had lots of buttons and things requiring fastening. They made me feel safe, cozy. In probably one out of every three or four pictures from that period, I am wearing overalls. That’s strange, but I was strange. In this particular picture, I am with my brother Joel and he is karate kicking me as I try to avoid his little foot. He was and is very energetic. We are three years apart. We are having fun. We are still very close. We were cute kids. It kills me to see that kind of naked joy in myself. I would give almost anything to be that free again.