Sue always wanted to have a picnic, one where some of our family showed up, where people ate and enjoyed the food and had fun and the weather cooperated. This is the closest she ever came to it. Usually the weather was bad or there was just no one to invite as me and the kid were somewhere else and none of the rest of them wanted anything to do with Argyle or old people.
Sue was happy at this one. I don't know who took the photos. I would think if it was me, Tommy would have been in the photos. Unless it was before Tommy was born. That's a possibility. It has to be after Tommy was born because Dad is not in the photos and Dad passed on when Tommy was a little boy. So I still don't know who took the photos.
Most picnic days arrived with rain.
Mom does not look pleased. I remember this look so well. Mom has that look like she swallowed a bug or has one in her mouth and doesn't know where to spit it.
This is that secret smile of hers. Its almost like she didn't want anyone to know she enjoyed herself.
And here she is looking really bored, like someone, namely Sue was forcing her to try to have fun. There were times when I though Mom hated having fun. Sue always went to a lot of trouble and Mom never seemed to be pleased with anything any of us did to try to make her happy. Dad was definitely like that.
Most family meals, when we had them, would evolve into chaos. We seldom sat down together to a meal. I don't remember us eating together when we were little except at Christmas, maybe Thanksgiving. I don't think Thanksgiving was ever a big deal for us.
Someone always got in a fight. Maybe it was only words but the words always hurt. Someone would accidently touch someone else's foot under the table and it would become a screaming match over who did what. We were unruly children and unruly adults or almost adults.
Christmas during the teen years was always traumatic. God, how I hated unwrapping things like bras or deodorant or soap. I always felt like they were pointing out how I smelled. It was all too personal. One time one of my sister actually gave me a box of tampons. Can you imagine the horror of unwrapping that while everyone watched?
Never was there a family get together when everyone liked the food. Someone always complained and refused to eat something. We were terrible kids, well, some of us were.
I would like to say that through it all we were loved and we knew it but the truth is, none of us ever felt sure of that love. It was seldom shown in any way. Approval was also a fleeting thing. Some of us never achieved approval. Some of us, myself especially, always felt they were never quite as good as the others or ever would be.
There was a me inside of me that they never knew about, a me who wanted approval if not love but never seemed to reach the top rung of that ladder. Mom would sometimes tell us she loved us but at the same time there was that note of "its only temporary" because by tomorrow or maybe even nightfall, you'd be in trouble again.
I really did love Mom and Dad but that didn't mean I had to like them or approve of the things they did or said so I guess it's only fair to give them the same rights.
I always felt like I had to do more, achieve more, reach for higher goals. It left me not only always grasping for the next limb but it stretched my limits so that I ignored doing things I could have been really good at, maybe, in order to find something they might actually approve of me doing. There were a lot of things in my life I was good at but there was nothing I was great at.
I envied then and still do now, those ones who can decide early on what they want to be and then go for it. They put all they have into that one thing and though they care if they fail, at least they know they tried. Maybe I never tried hard enough. Maybe I would have failed at all of those things but it would have been nice to know that I had tried.
It was one of the reasons I went back and finished college. I wanted to prove to my son that his mom wasn't a loser.
I talked to Sue and now have an update for this. It was before I went in the Army. I took the photos. I forgot that completely.
Sue said that Dad is not in the pictures because he refused to eat outdoors if he didn't have to do it. I forgot about this way that Dad felt. I can see it clearly now. Dad only ate outdoors when we were forced to by circumstances. I think eating outdoors was a sign of poor times to him.