Mom Photos

Remember I said my mom, in her younger years, looked like Jacqueline Kennedy? Well, I looked for some photos to prove my point. I have very few old family photos at my disposal (my mom still has most of them), but I did manage to rummage up these three. I don't know if they're very good examples of the point I was making. I'm pretty sure they're not. But it was still fun to have an excuse to look through my most ancient pics and equally fun to embarrass my family by posting them here.

Here's my mom sunbathing. She was big on sunbathing. This was long before the whole sunscreen craze telling us to FEAR THE SUN. I did my fair share of sunbathing, but I wasn't anywhere near as keen on it as the rest of my family. Anyway, mom is somewhere in her middle thirties in this photo. Look at how skinny and young and adorable she was! She's still pretty skinny and young and adorable for a woman in her 70's, she's never bothered acting her age - I suspect she considers it a waste of time.

Also humiliated in this photo, my younger sister Laurie who, I am thankful for this one moment, never reads my blog. She was at that awkward pre-teen stage here. Just starting to get breasts, hair that refused to lay flat (which was the popular style at the time), glasses. She was a geeky kid back before it was cool to be geeky. I think her life would have been very different if she'd been born a decade or two later. Well, wouldn't we all.

Last but not least, a not very flattering peek at my most gorgeous of all dogs, Sheila.


A family portrait from just a few years down the road. Sorry my dad isn't in the pic. My parents divorced when I was ten. My dad was certainly still a big part of my life, but not an everyday part of the family. Sigh. Anyway, here we all are, just us girls, in our matching outfit glory.

Mom in the lefthand corner with her hair dark and poofy. She was always doing something to her hair, which is still thick and grows about two inches a day. She'd color it, streak it, grow it out, chop it off, floof it, add hair pieces. There were a few occasions when she ended up with unexpected results - orange or purple hair. Another example of how someone would have had different options if they'd lived in different times. If my mom was young in this current generation, she'd probably be the one with blue spikey hair one day, bleached with pink tips the next.

Me in the top left. At this point in time both me and my sister Laurie wore glasses, but we took them off for the camera. I also remember that the turtleneck I'm wearing and the sweater my sister is wearing were new outfits, meaning, we had bought the tops new and they weren't used or hand me downs. Not that it bothered me to wear either, but it must have been fairly uncommon for us to get new clothing for me to remember it so clearly. I had a couple of turtlenecks, in different colors. Funny, now I NEVER wear them. A mock turtleneck maybe, if it's below ten degrees fahrenheit. Maybe.

Laurie on the top right. Our only blonde and the middle child. She was our Jan Brady. Which, embarrassingly, makes me Marcia, but the shoes fit us both so, there ya go. I always envied her ability to wear more exotic clothing and to wear more dramatic make up. Not that I didn't wear make up back in those days as well, I did, just not as much, and not in such dramatic colors. I wear make up once in a blue moon now. I don't think my sister wears it much anymore either.

Last but not least, my youngest sister Lisa in the bottom right. She wasn't really a Cindy to our Jan and Marcia. She was more .... I don't know. She was quiet. One of my most vivid memories of her as a child (she'd probably outgrown the habit by the time this photo was taken... maybe) was her habit of sitting on the edge of the dirt road in the front of the house. She would pour a handful of dirt and rocks on her head and then sit there quietly and pick out the gravel. Lisa does read my blog so .... let's hope we're still speaking after this. Hehe. And the rest of the story is that this sister is now a big time veterinary doctor and university professor. A grown up with fancy degrees on her wall. And she doesn't put rocks in her hair anymore. At least, not that I know of.


One more photo of my mom about six or seven years later. Those were my kittens when I lived for a short time in an apartment across from the old railroad station in Novato, CA. I'm so not an apartment person, but I really liked that spot. The silly tabby grinning for the picture was Pepper. He lived a long happy life with us. I don't remember what we named the black one as we found a new home for her/him? shortly after. But I digress. So, my mom had to be..... I'm gonna guess 42, give or take a year, in this photo. Which is ten years younger than me now. And yet looking at this photo I remember that I was already an adult, about to be or just married, and I remember I thought my mom was SOOOOO OLD!!!

Damn, even with grungy work clothes and no make up, she still looks great here, doncha think? Because I started having kids later, I'm a lot older when my kids are the age that I was then. If I thought my mom looked old, my newly adult kids probably think I look beyond ancient. Sigh.

Oh, and I loved that chair. I think the frame finally went. Or maybe just the upholstery and I didn't know what to do with it. I wish I still had it.

And while I'm wishing...... I wish I still looked that young. I wish I had a million dollars. I wish men would stop having selective hearing. I wish teenagers would appreciate that grown ups don't always have their head up their ass when they're dispensing advice. I wish my cats would stop being evil. I wish the sewer fairy would come fix our pipes while we were sleeping. I wish all my kids lived close enough to visit whenever I wanted.

That was fun. Maybe I'll share more old photos.