The Story of Us

O: The Oprah Magazine, Dec, 2001 by Joyce Maynard

It was an amazing Christmas present for JOYCE MAYNARD to give her children--and a way to find her own small version of peace.

TIME WAS, I'D LINE MY HUSBAND and children up every December in our holiday-theme sweaters with the camera set on automatic timer and record the image for our annual Christmas card. For that one instant anyway, we looked like a happy family

Since my divorce 12 years ago, I've spent December 25 with my children only every other year. Sometimes I've visited friends on those childless Christmases. A couple of times I've volunteered at soup kitchens. But as last Christmas drew closer--one of the off years--I made the decision simply to be alone.

It seemed as if the stage I'd reached in life--age 46, with the youngest of my children on the verge of leaving home--called for a certain quiet reflection. Instead of being melancholy, I figured I'd use that stretch of days between Christmas and New Year's when my house would be empty as a time for taking stock.

I've given my kids some amazing presents over the years. An electric train from Germany Beautiful dolls with hand-sewn wardrobes. Once I drove 300 miles to pick up a ventriloquist's antique puppet for my son Willy. Another year I located, in the basement of a department store going out of business, a mannequin the size of my daughter, Audrey Never mind that I seldom had the money for the stuff I used to place under the tree. Every year I felt an obligation to match or top the excesses of the year before.

Last December, though, the picture came to me of a tree with just three packages under the branches. One for each of my children. And I knew what each box would contain.

After my marriage ended, I'd stopped putting photographs in albums. Instead I stuffed them into cardboard boxes, and whenever one of my three children needed a picture, we'd rummage through the boxes. After a decade our photographs were a complete mess. Pictures of my daughter's first birthday were mixed in with her high school graduation. You'd pull out a photograph of Willy's performance, at age 10, as Ben Franklin in the musical 1776, and the next one in the pile might show me pregnant with his older brother, Charlie. Images of myself and our friends, my children's father, grandparents now dead, houses we didn't live in anymore, spilled out in all directions. Sometimes it seemed like a reflection on our life.

AS THE YEARS PASSED I AVOIDED the cardboard boxes. What upset me was not just the disorder of our photographs but the avalanche of memories they evoked. Where did the woman go who painstakingly stuck the baby pictures of her firstborn in the album the day they came back from being processed? As for those babies, the youngest was almost 17. And the man in the picture with his arms around me moments after our son's birth was now a distant stranger I would greet, in June, at our son's high school graduation.

I still cared enough to take all those photographs over the years. But maybe because the story hadn't turned out happily ever after, I'd lost the motivation to document it. By not putting the photographs in a book, some part of me had failed to honor the story of our family. Now felt like the moment to do that.

Over the ten days that my children celebrated the holiday with their father 3,000 miles away, I bought three leather-bound albums with thick creamy pages and laid out the contents of the boxes to begin the huge job of sorting the pictures into years--from Audrey's birth in 1978, right after the biggest blizzard in 90 years, to the fall of 2000, when Charlie headed off to college. In between were birthday parties, soccer games, Audrey displaying her science fair project "What Makes Your Ears Pop?," Willy dressed up for Halloween as a little old lady, Charlie executing a skateboard jump, Audrey in a vintage prom gown that used to be mine. Then there were those other pictures: of my children's father--a heartbreakingly handsome man only a few years older in the early pictures than Charlie is now.

I know a woman who, in the aftermath of a particularly bitter divorce, went through her family photographs with a razor blade and cut her ex-husband's face out of every single picture. For me, it seemed important that the books I was making of our children's lives contain pictures not only of them and their friends but of their father and me. Some of the photographs from our children's baby years made me sad--knowing, as I do now, how far apart we ended up and how much anger and hurt got us there. In one department store special, "Your Family Portrait for 99 Cents," the two of us stand side by side in front of a fake mountain scene with our week-old baby in our entwined arms. My husband, just 25 at the time, wears a hat I'd bought him from a mail-order catalog, a Christmas splurge at $19.95. I've got the full breasts and thick figure of a nursing mother in the first days after delivery We had just sprung for a restaurant meal-at McDonald's.

Of all the events in a family's history recorded by a camera--births, graduations, holidays, weddings--divorce remains undocumented. It shows up mostly in what's missing from the pictures, the person who isn't there, and sometimes in the pain on the faces of the ones who are left. The rare pictures from 1989 and 1990 in which I appear at all show a thin, tense, and unhappy-looking woman. Well, that's what I was back then.