This is why I scrapbook -- This is a story that my son wrote for me on his blog in 2011.
This is all I need!
Of course I made a layout with this story, but it was long before I found TLP so I won't post it; but it's the story that's important.
Sci-Fi Madre
May 14, 2011
My mother re-wrote history for me. How many people can say that?
In my sophomore year of college I went through a really terrible breakup. It was my first one, after a multi year relation ship and I was in a bad place for a long while. We were in the same major and so I had to put up with being around my ex far more than I would like.
My mother scrapbooks. She has been doing so since I was in elementary school, and we have books that document every year of our family since she started. Birthdays, major holidays and other big events get documented so we can remember them. Sometimes she can be a year or two behind on a given book but thats’ just because she puts so much work into each one.
As I was going through the worst (and only, at that point) breakup of my life, my mother was scrapbooking. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was also rewriting history. I spent a lot of time with my girlfriend when we were together, and it showed up in pictures. It’s bound to happen. But my mother saw the pain I was in at the time and wanted to do everything she could to make me feel better. I don’t know exactly how far behind she was in her scrapbooking, but from that moment forward, she removed any picture with the woman who became my ex. My mother would not let anybody who had so strongly hurt her son grace the pages of a book as sacred as our family album. She later told me about it when she finished the book, I was surprised by it, and didn’t really know what to think. On the page about my first birthday in college there is a picture of me holding up a shirt about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and smiling. I know my then girlfriend was sitting next to me on the couch, but there is no trace of her in the book. I know what to think now. I know my mother did it out of an incredibly powerful love. So now when I look at that picture, or put on that shirt, I don’t think about the breakup that tore me to pieces. Instead, I think about my mother who loves me so much she would rewrite history to make me happy.
Mother’s day was last week and I got to spend it with my parents because it was also the weekend of my graduation from grad school. I got my mom a book of stories put together by the
Story Corps about moms. We talked a little about the organization, which I am a big fan of, and how they have the amazing goal of recording everybody’s stories.
This is one of my stories about my mom and the second half of my Mother’s Day gift to her. Thank you.