Family Puzzles: Pictures of My Mother’s Life, Pieces of Myself

Abstract

My mother, Edith, was born in England in 1906 and died in Australia in 1994. The stories she told of her large working-class family were so much a part of my early life that turn-of-the-century Manchester, England, often seemed more real to me than 1950s Sydney, Australia, where I grew up. By the time I reached adolescence, her childhood, womanhood, and motherhood had been etched so deeply into my identity I believed I knew her as well as I knew myself. Now, as I gather together fragments of her life for a memoir, I am discovering how much my mother left unsaid and as I work through these gaps in my knowledge, the missing pieces in the puzzle of my mother’s life continue to challenge the picture I once held of her.
Interweaving family history with reflections on research and writing, this personal essay considers the misunderstandings, myths, and mysteries that so often underlie family relationships. Referring to photographs and a number of old documents discovered after my mother’s death, I reflect on how the untold stories provided me with additional insights into the everyday mores of an era and raised further questions about my relationship with the person who was my mother.