paper thin heart
 |
It’s my mom’s birthday today, although 15 years have passed since she’s physically been here to celebrate the date. For as close as we were, few photographs exist of the two of us together. She always camera shy, and I always the photographer, they simply didn’t come to be, and then time ran out and the opportunity forever lost.
Now I’m making the images for other mothers and daughters that I will never have with my own mom. But it’s in the creating of each of these photographs that I receive another precious fragment of the missing portrait of her and I. Her elegant slender hands…….waves of luxurious copper hair falling on her shoulders……and the way she looked at me as if I was the most exquisite creature she’d ever seen.
As I look through the viewfinder at other mothers and daughters, I understand that my own mom is not really gone from me. And perhaps it‘s in making these portraits for others that a void within me gets filled that might not otherwise. I do know I love to do them.
Many thanks to Sheryl Crow for her wonderful song, “Detours”, which portrays my own paper thin heart so perfectly, and the surprising way I still look to my mother for guidance after all these years.
~Cynthia
 |
Mother, can you hold me together
It’s so dark and I’m losing my way
I took all of these detours to find love
But when I did, it just faded away
Now what do I do
With the sweet love of mine
Do I give it away and
Hope someday I’ll find
Someone half as awake
As the moon and the stars
Mother, teach me to love
With a paper-thin heart
Mother, your words are so healing
You speak of love and of light and of peace
But I’ve made it my course to avoid you
Just to hide from these feelings of grief
Now what do I do
With the sweet love of mine
Do I give it away and
Hope someday I’ll find
Someone half as awake
As the moon and the stars
Mother, teach me to love
With a paper-thin heart
Mother, I know you are with me
You were there when I took my first breath
I can’t stop looking back for the answers
I just keep coming up with regret
There are some things I just can’t forget
~Sheryl Crow
