no corner cutting here

This project is not allowing me to cut corners.
I wanted to finish a new video this week, but instead while working on it made I realized that I was missing something and after a week of editing and re-doing and deleting and and and … I finally admitted defeat and only then I found out what this new episode was really going to about and I understood what was bothering me all the time.
And it´s not only the lack of expression of feelings  in the letters I was reading, but it´s all about denial and keeping up appearances long after everything has fallen apart.
Funny also how I always rationnaly knew this was the case and was bothering me then and now, but somehow to really know something you need to feel it and realize it in a profounder way.
So, a fresh start in two weeks … but first, a holiday. Well deserved, even if I say so myself. 

unrelated picture. 1981. USA trip. happier times. not perfect though. and some signs of what was going to come.

1987

I have been working on a new part of the project for days now ... but somehow I feel stuck. I had been reading letters my mother had written to me in 1987 while I was a youth holiday camp in England. The idea was to make a video based on those letters.
But suddenly I got lost in the process, not liking my voice reading was one issue, not feeling the letters, another. There is a sense of loneliness in them, and I tried going with that, but mainly they lack something I cannot put my finger on. Feelings. They lack feelings.
My mother wrote a lot of letters to a lot of people and she was a good writer, but there is nothing in them that tells me how she was doing. She is describing her day, where she went, what she did. Preparing a family trip to the US, a visit from my uncle with his family from the Netherlands, whom she called and where they went for Sunday lunch .... but I am not getting anywhere near her, I cannot feel her in those words. She sounds normal and distant. 
And then she wrote to me in English. Why? Because I was in England? It puts even more distance between her and myself.
I was miserable at that camp (everybody else seemed to be having a great time though) and I was probably looking forward to hearing from her, but I don´t really remember much about that ...
I was 15 at the time. She was 49.
49. That´s not really old, is it. But she looked old then. The illnesses had taken their toll. I cannot imagine how she felt. She had already been through so much. Endured so much. And what I always wonder, why didn´t she try to change everything. Or was it too late already?
Was she protecting me and my brother?

Mom in 1987. The jacket she is wearing was actually mine.

letter writer.
Mom.
the scar. 
I suddenly remember your scar on the arm. I remember it visceraly. I remember your physicality. That you were once a real live person. I now miss more then the idea of you, I miss you.
Strnge that I had forgotten how it felt to miss the physical presence of you. It´s a different kind of pain.

later.

how come that it is often only in retrospect that we realize that a period of our life was actually rather good? or are we simply erasing from our memory the unpleasant parts and are embellishing that which was?
on the other hand some periods of my life have been so painful that i see only now how much of my feelings i had to repress in order to remain at least half functioning. funny how one can sometimes feel the real pain and despair only decades later. when my mother died i didn´t feel anything. well, yes, go course i must have felt something, but i completely totally repressed all feelings immediately. it did help me cope and survive the immediate aftermath of this event. but then gradually my inability to feel what had happened and this half-grief started poisoning my life. every relationship i had was ruled by fear of loss and a huge gaping sadness. and every parting of a partner, even for a couple of hours, gave me panic attacks. even though i was rationally aware that my feelings were hugely exagerated and totally misplaced, i couldn`t help having them.
It is only now, 23 years later (!) that i am beginning to couple the right feelings with the right events and persons …. and that i realize what a terrible sadness i must have had inside of me that i just could´t allow to let out, or it would have killed me.

and here is video number two of the "Layers of time (finding Mom) " project

it took me a while to decide that my videos do not necessarily have to be chronologically, or otherwise, ordered ...
It is ok to just make what I feel is right at that moment, a thing that is difficult enough to realize.
Two idea are at the origin of this short segment: the paralyzing request my Mom made hours before she died: "don´t be sad, Anne" ... and a letter my uncle gave me, a letter my mother wrote to her parents from Paris in 1959, during her first year at university.

Paris has always been a really important place to my mom, and we went there quite often, I always thought that I would live there one day as well, something that never happened. Apart from having studied there, we often visited "tante Jeanne", Jeanne Lemaire, who lived in a buburb, easily accessible with the RER. "Tante Jeanne" was of course neither mine, nor my mothers aunt, but somehow related to us nevertheless .... around three corners... or four.
I admired Jeanne for her travelling around the world ... she went "everywhere" and we got great slide shows everytime we went to visit ... and she often brought me nice and interesting presents.

Jeanne Lemaire

Mom in Paris, 1959

here is the first intro video for the project "Finding Mom"

and this is the picture I inserted. Taken in in 1974 (or 1975) in Boston, Massachusetts. We lived there for nearly a year while my Dad was doing post graduate studies at Harvard. My Mom stayed at home and, I think, was really lonely. She made friends though with a Belgian family that lived in the same building. I became friends with one of their daughters, Bénédicte. They were from Louvain la neuve and were very catholic, but modern at the same time. A combination that always puzzeled me ...
With Bénédicte I went to the MIT kindergarden. She didn´t speak a word of English.
I was lucky that my Mom hab made sure that I understood and spoke the language ... A lot of Richard Scarry books helped ...