Family Portraits

Pose. Look happy.

Maggie here. I’m on vacation but I’ll be back next week. This week’s guest post is from Catherine Wigginton Greene. Catherine is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and dialogue facilitator driven by a profound commitment to strengthening human connection and understanding. She is the co-author (with Christine Platt) of the novel Rebecca, Not Becky (HarperCollins, 2023); director of the feature documentary I’m Not Racist… Am I?; and writer and producer of the sketch comedy stage production Let’s Take This Offline. You can find her online @IAmCatherineWigginton and www.CatherineWiggintonGreene.com.

By Catherine Wigginton Greene

It’s an inside joke in our family that every one of our stories starts out with the address of wherever we were living at the time. When my oldest brother backed the car out of the driveway as a toddler? That was 1075 South Carter¹. The day my dad broke a pool cue over another brother’s back? We were living at 508 Mercury Way. And the afternoon my mom started a fire in the oven and the firefighters arrived: 751 Franklin.

I always assumed we moved a lot out of necessity. Each time my mother birthed another child, she and my dad found a bigger house. I was the sixth and last baby to arrive, nine years after the one just before me and 22 years after the oldest. I, myself, lived in seven different homes by the time I turned 18 years old, which means my older siblings must have lived in at least 10.

The consistent packing up, moving out, and moving in made my mother an expert at making a home in a short amount of time. Her first task was to hang our family photos on the entryway wall, beginning with the daguerreotypes of frowning ancestors, and continuing with the full collection of Sears family portraits. She arranged them in chronological order which meant every couple of portraits featured a brand-new baby on her lap.

Of these dozens of portraits, only two included me. In the first one, I take my turn as “the baby,” sitting on my mother’s lap. I wear a white dress with a Peter Pan collar and puffy blue sleeves, smile like I was giggling, and have a head of short black curls that grows from the back of my neck up over my crown, not quite yet reaching my forehead.

Not too long after that photograph was made, my family—at least as pictured—began to break down. My sister graduated college, got a job, and moved into her own apartment. Two of my other brothers moved out, (or perhaps more accurately, were forced out, though to this day, no one has ever given me the full story). Then my parents’ New Yorker knock-off magazine This Week in Denver went bankrupt and my father couldn’t find work. So he moved out to the East Coast, bouncing around in various writing jobs.

“It’s just temporary,” my parents told me. “He’ll commute back and forth.”

He came back only once in 12 years, when my grandmother—his mother—died. On the day of the funeral, a few months before my ninth birthday, my father set up a tripod in the backyard at 508 Mercury Way to orchestrate what would be our last family portrait. My sister and four brothers stood behind my parents who were seated in folding chairs next to me, every one of us squinting into the late morning sunlight with the kind of smile one forces on the day they are burying their mother/mother-in-law/grandmother.

Not long after that, my father returned to the East Coast and my parents, while still legally married, stopped talking to one another except for matters dealing with the business of parenting me. And, over time, my father stopped talking to my siblings, as well. There was no big blowout fight that led to any official declaration of estrangement. Just a slow and steady loosening until no connection remained at all. By the time I was 15 years old, I was the only one in the family who still spoke with my father.

Despite that fact, my mother continued to mount our family portraits on the wall of every house we lived in. These photographs became an obsession of mine, along with the collection of family photo albums my mom had created over the years. I loved the idea that I was from such a big family and proudly shared with anyone who asked me about my family that I was the youngest of six kids. The truth, though, was that I was alone.

My siblings had all moved out of the house by the time I was 10. So it was just my mom, me, and the ghost of the family that existed before I arrived. To fill that void, I would gaze at the family portraits and flip through the photo albums, studying my parents’ and siblings’ expressions, certain they were enjoying the joyful chaos of a house full of five little kids. I thought about all that I missed out on. All that they did together without me, before me. These people were bound together with shared stories and trauma, Christmases and fights and camping vacations and cross-country road trips in a Volkswagen van. They were my family. But I didn’t really know them. They were a family. And I wanted in, desperately.

My parents did eventually get divorced and my father stopped talking to me, as well. The last I heard from him was decades ago on my 18th birthday during my first semester in college. He sent me a card along with a check for $18. He probably called me, too, but I don’t remember our conversation. I didn’t know it would be the last time we’d speak to one another.

Two summers ago, I flew with my husband and daughters to Denver for my mother’s 90th birthday. All six of us “kids” and my mother were in Denver at the same time for the first time in years and I wanted a photograph to… I don’t know why. To prove that we were still a family? I knew better.

Because even though we were all physically in the same space, I couldn’t get everyone even to stand next to one another, let alone convince them to pose for a photograph. Our slow-burn style of estrangement had by then created a near-silent distance between my mom and three of my siblings. It’s been two years since that day, and only a few of us speak to one another at all.

I can appreciate now, as a grown woman with a husband and children of my own, that my family was a lot more complicated than those Sears portraits could have ever revealed. Of course it was.

The photos were staged, and that was the point. Wear nice clothes. Pose. Look happy. We are a family, dammit.

And we were a family. We are a family. Even if there won’t be any more family portraits.

1. Street names and some other identifying info have been changed.