so many projects, only nine months - the wall

The family picture wall. A project among many. Not really started in earnest, but thought about a lot. We have frames, matts, a wall picked out. And here is this child-to-be, half me, half Mike, nestled between plates of pasta and Irish soda bread. Here, at the center of this upcoming wall, the creature supposedly residing in my belly. Having been gathering information and pictures of my family along with genealogy research for some time (pre-pregnancy), I have a good number of photos for the wall. I have stately portraits of bearded patriarchs just off the boat. I have vintage stuff like each grandmother in a wide-brimmed hat, young and smiling.

We asked Mike's mom for old family pictures from his side to balance out our little wall. My mother-in-law sent back a nice little black and white of his grandparents standing in front of a brick row house, and then a roll of film from the 70's of a boy scout camping trip Mike went on. They were the kind of pictures with the rounded edges (remember?) and an overexposed reddish tint, and included things like a field with a tent in it and a blurry shot of Mike and his dad eating hot dogs from too far away. Needless to say, there's still a bit of an imbalance in our pictorial family collections.

The idea of these picture walls and picture albums beyond documenting, is perhaps to romanticize. Oh, look! we can say. The line from which I come. There they are, all my dead family members, quiet and well-behaved and hanging on the wall. Something in me tells me that lesser quality film developing from the 70's showing picnic tables and poor lunch choices – although aesthetically less than pleasing – are not so much a problem in and of themselves, but because they are all too real.

Perhaps I want my baby to enter into a more idealic scene than tent sites amidst brown grass. For his or her first photo, all pink wrinkles and balled up fists, to be centered amongst serene close ups of people from times gone by, where the viewer's imagination plays a role in building the life story of those photographed. One must grow into one's family slowly. The world beyond the photos will come in due time.