I love this story because it helped me understand some of my own angst after leaving college.  A close friend and I often talk about this “scene” that was my mother’s in the early 60′s.  Not only does it remind us of Edvard Munch’s painting, “The Scream”,  but it helps us to relate to our own struggle with identity and what it means to be a woman in this era.  My mother was a beautiful, happy bride, but she was a also a thinker.

Virginia Keller studied philosophy and theology in college and she was ahead of her time.  She rejected a handsome, athletic suitor from her hometown when he  proposed to her while she was in college.  She had other plans.  She met and loved my father, but decided to separate from him to go to graduate school in Chicago and  she lived in Lincoln Park in an apartment way before it was “hip”.  Instead of walking down the aisle by herself, she walked to the alter, hand in hand with her groom.

My mother never had a chance to finish her studies.  After a year or two, she missed my father, but men were not allowed to live in the dorms with women students.  Men, on the other hand, were completely free to bring their wives to live at school with them.  So my mother made a choice.  And that choice sacrificed a bit of who she was – no, a lot of who she was.  She loved my dad  and she made the commitment, but then was reduced to running down the street for a pack of smokes while my father was at work.

My mother has told me that she began to feel better when she started taking classes again and while working at a local church’s early childhood program.  But she claims that it was motherhood that brought her the most joy.   “I never even thought I wanted children,” she has said, “but once you guys came along I was on cloud nine.”

Lucky for us, we had her for a mother and we also inherited her philosophical side (the good and the bad).  When I was about 7 or 8 I remember sitting on her lap in a total panic.  I asked her, “Mom am I here, am I here?!”

She said, “Of course you’re here.”  I replied, “But how do you KNOW I’m here?”  I felt completely alone.

She continued to comfort me, “Because I see you, and feel you, and love you.”

This didn’t calm me so much, senses just didn’t seem like “proof” enough.   She just sat there reassuring me until I got hungry or something.

Now I know that whether  I’m “here” or not, that beautiful woman’s face, hands, warmth are always there looking back at me and reminding me that you don’t have to run out your door for a pack of cigarettes when you have an existential crisis.  You just remember the woman that reminds you of who you are.   And in return, you should remember that before that woman was a wife and mother, she had dreams of her own.

Or perish from the Hill-

Without the privilege to know

That they are Beautiful

How many cast a nameless Pod

Upon the nearest Breeze-

Unconscious of the Scarlet Freight-

It bear to other eyes -

Emily Dickinson

And now a child can understand
That this is the law of all the land
All the land

The world is black
The world is white
It turns by day and then by night
The child is black
The child is white
Together they grow to see the light
To see the light

And now at last we plainly see
We’ll have a dance of liberty
The world is black
The world is white
It turns by day and then by night
The child is black
The child is white
The whole world looks upon the sight
The beautiful sight

The world is black
The world is white
It turns by day and the by night
The child is black
The child is white
Together they grow to see the light
To see the light

This song by Three Dog Night hit the top of the charts when I was 4 years old in 1972.   It was on the radio constantly and I remember vividly staring out the window of our station wagon and listening to the words intently.  My parents taught us to look beyond our somewhat segregated, racist community and emphasized the beliefs of Martin Luther King Jr. and John Kennedy.  Somehow all of that, this song, and the free thinking of the  70′s created a picture in my mind and when I stared out the window,  I “saw” what the song suggested.   I even remember having some remote thought of  “I am a child, and one day this will change because we are being taught differently.”

When I shot these photos, President Obama was just beginning his campaign when he visited a small ice cream shop in Oak Park, Ill.   I didn’t have a press pass and I remember pressing myself up against the glass and trying to shoot between people who were strategically placed around the window to block the view.   I came back to the office late, edited my photos and placed several on the desk of an editor.  I heard the next day that she supposedly “laughed” at my efforts.  I was very upset.

But now it does not matter.  A young Barack was somewhere on the globe when that Three Dog Night song came out and I feel so lucky and privileged to have documented  a new reality that my generation helped to create.  That editor has since left the business and it goes to stand that no matter how you feel about his politics or presidency, if you can’t see the magnitude of that moment as a citizen – let alone the editor of a newspaper – then you my friend, are dead.