My mother has two daughters. I have two daughters. No one can predict how the lineage of females will unfold. Yet, it’s interesting when it repeats.
When I look at pictures that are close to 40 years old, I see my mother in a different way than I experience her now (which is complicated). I feel an overwhelming nostalgia and sadness. At the same time I feel what I can only describe as a primal feeling of the power of motherhood. 
My mother, born and raised in Germany, in one of the worst eras of that country’s history, came to the USA in 1960 to seek a new life. She got a job and hung out with other Europeans while having the time of her life in a new country that was busting many social barriers. It must have been liberating. She met and married a dashing American man, who’d prove eventually to be irresponsible. She had her first child (me) in 1965.
I was about 10 years old when I discovered that they were married perhaps 6 months before I was born. It was a shocking revelation at the time. In an instant my broken family life started to make sense. My mother married my father because she was pregnant with me. She has never told me this, but I’m sure of it. My sister was born a year later in what I imagine to be an honest try at building a family that could grow a marriage. It didn’t work. Forty years later it doesn’t matter that much to me. I think it’s a rather common story.
As my husband and I are cobbling a photo collection of my mother for her 70th birthday, I look at these photos and see a woman in love with her girls, who committed her life to making things work, and it wasn’t easy – and it’s still not easy.
It’s both humbling to review an archive of photos and cautionary. I wish to have a relationship with my girls that is warm, open and mutual. But sometimes lives take turns no one can anticipate. What heartaches might ensue? Maybe my girls will look at their childhood photos in some computer archive and wonder the same.
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