Rewriting the Story of My Parents’ Marriage
By: Patsy Fergusson
Tags: Memoir, Family History, Heart, Family, Relationships

Rewriting the Story of My Parents’ Marriage

How old footage of my family helped me see my mother through a new lens

My family at Seabright Beach in Santa Cruz, California, in 1959. I’m on the far right. Photo courtesy of Patsy Fergusson

We’d had the big white box of old 8mm and Super 8mm family movies for 40 years, handing it off from sister to sister after Mom died of breast cancer in 1975, each one of us promising to digitize or otherwise take care of these precious family heirlooms. No one had.

Then one summer in Santa Cruz, at the little beach house Mom had bought with an unexpected windfall the year she died, we set up an old projector my husband had found on eBay, along with a portable screen. My four sisters and I crowded into the tiny living room with sundry offspring, butts on the blue-carpeted floor, or the dark brown fur-covered couch, or the bright orange beanbag chair leaking white styrofoam pebbles.

My brother-in-law, Paul — an honorary sister by now, after practically growing up in our family while married to Jackie for almost 50 years — handed me each film, randomly selected, from The Box, and the fest began.

Some films dated from before I was born, and many were labeled with my mother’s handwriting: “High Sierra Fishing Pack Trip, 1940”; “Robert and Toni’s family, ’46–51”; “Christmas Dinner at Grandma Claire’s, 1946”; “Bonnie’s Reel, 1948.” We oohed and aahed as we recognized our relatives in their handsome youth. Some of us drifted off to play a board game in the dining area as the fest wore on. But not me. I was the projectionist. I was the current possessor of The Box. And I was determined to know everything that was in it so we could decide what to do with it, at long last.

What I’d seen with my child’s eyes was just the surface. What I saw with my adult ones was what lay underneath. And it meant that Mom’s life wasn’t wasted.

Paul handed me “Seabright 1948.” It opened with a shot of my mother, looking like I’d never seen her, with long black hair and a trim figure in a two-piece retro bathing suit, laced up at the sides. It was a rare treat to see her at all, since she was usually holding the camera. She was so young and beautiful! She posed on the parapet of the castle that used to stand on Seabright beach in Santa Cruz, turning this way and that, smiling for the camera.

“It’s Mom!” I squealed, and my sisters ran back to look.

My mom on the castle that used to stand on Seabright Beach, 1948.

Then the scene changed to children in the waves. Grown-ups on the sand. Giant inner tubes and flouncy bathing suits and lots of running back and forth, just a little too fast. That went on for 10 minutes. Then, in the last two seconds, there was my mother again on the parapet. This time she was leaning over the railing towards the Pacific Ocean, looking back over her shoulder at the camera. She stood still and looked, hair blowing a bit in the wind, closing her eyelids slowly and opening them slowly, giving a secret smile. I was transported.

“Oh my God! Who’s she looking at?”

“What?” asked Paul, perplexed.

“Who is she giving that look to? Who’s holding the camera?”

“Well, that would have to be your dad, wouldn’t it?”

“My Dad?” The idea of my mother giving my father that look took a long moment for me to absorb. But then, “Yes… yes, it must be! She’s giving that look to Dad!”

That moment changed history — at least, it changed mine.

My mom, 1948.

For most of my life, I’ve told myself this story about my family of origin: My father was bipolar and an alcoholic, and my mother disliked him for the trouble he caused.

They might have loved each other when they got married, sure, but I’d never seen any evidence of it. By the time I came along, the fourth of five children, they were amid a cold war. Each had fortified their opposing position and rarely attempted détente.

They never touched each other. Never kissed. Never said an affectionate word. They rarely went out alone or with friends. At night, they sat separately in the living room — Mom reading a book on the blue-checked swivel chair, Dad watching TV on the dark velvet couch. Sometimes Dad would say something amusing and Mom would laugh. But not every night.

As a child in the ’50s and ’60s, it didn’t bother me much. Parents let their kids alone in my era — we weren’t tightly knit. For all I knew, parental relations were chilly in everyone’s household. As a teen in the ’70s, I was too self-involved to care. Then at 20, I began to have questions. But before I could ask them, or even let them fully form, Mom died.

She tried. She resisted his declines into depression, restrained his manic ascents. She stayed married to him and tried to hold it all together. And from what I can tell, she succeeded.

So the sad story stuck, working its dark magic, until 40 years later in the living room of our little beach house in Santa Cruz, when everything changed.

Mom did love my father! I could see that she did! What I’d seen with my child’s eyes was just the surface. What I saw with my adult ones was what lay underneath. And it meant that Mom’s life wasn’t wasted.

It’s true she didn’t save him. She didn’t inspire him to stop drinking or to stop taking pills. She didn’t get him to see a psychiatrist. (One time, she did call the police to take him to the hospital, where the doctors kept him for a month. He never forgave her for that.) But she tried. She resisted his declines into depression, restrained his manic ascents. She stayed married to him and tried to hold it all together. And from what I can tell, she succeeded. Perhaps the memory of her smile in Seabright fought off his worse psychoses. Perhaps her chill form was Dad’s living anchor, keeping him tethered to the real world from her blue-checked chair.

I wish Mom had lived long enough for me to thank her; I wish she’d lived long enough for me to understand.

I remember the lines of a Robert Hayden poem, “Those Winter Sundays,” about the narrator’s father, who got up early every morning, even on Sundays, put his clothes on in the dark, and built the fire to warm the house before waking his children, who never thanked him.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Perhaps my mother didn’t even know herself. She died so young, at 56 — four years younger than I was when I saw the film clip and rewrote her history, transforming her from long-suffering martyr to warrior wife.