Last May, I drove out to see my mom for the first time since the pandemic started.

Last May, I drove out to see my mom for the first time since the pandemic started. I ended up (as I often did at her house) in the basement, going through old books and yearbooks and photo albums. Mostly, I look for my old baby pictures (there is one particular album that I haven’t been able to find in years), but that day, I came across an old album that only held photos of my mother.

The album contained photos from when my mom, and later my dad, first came to the United States from the Philippines. Those first two years before my eldest sister was born.

There were two photos in particular that I couldn’t stop staring at, from when my mother was first pregnant. It was as if I thought that if I kept staring long enough, I would get a glimpse of this life that I would otherwise never know, because she’ll never tell me. I look at her face in these photographs, and I wonder what she was going through, what she was being put through. If he had started to show the other side of who he was. And if he had, what were the thoughts running through her mind? I tried to search her eyes for an answer I would never find.

So much of my mother’s life, from before she was my mother, is such a mystery to me. She’s told me small things here and there before — no long stories, nothing too detailed. Taking care of the chickens after school, making dolls with cornsilk hair. Playing the ukulele and listening to the Bee Gees. My aunties in the Philippines told me about her coming home from school every day and going straight to her room to listen to the Bee Gees. I feel like I have bits and pieces of a larger puzzle that I will probably never be able to put together. Our relationship, as with many familial relationships, has been complicated, with its ups and downs, things said and left unsaid. Stories from the past left largely untold.

The parts of the puzzle with the most missing pieces are the parts starting from when he comes into her life, up until I can start recalling my own memories. I have no idea how or when my parents met, how long they dated, what day they were married. From the time when I can start recalling memories, the intensity of his presence was enough to carry. The fear, the tension, the anxiety, was so present that there was really no need or desire to talk about the past. I asked them once when their anniversary was, and they both refused to answer me directly. I didn’t ask much else about their past after that.

After he was gone, I still didn’t ask. There really wasn’t any need to.

And so there will always be so much of my mother’s life from before that will always be a mystery to me. And that’s okay, because I don’t have to know everything, and she doesn’t have to share anything. Part of me will always wish we had shared more with each other. If we had, maybe we could have supported each other more in healing from our shared trauma, rather than go through it separately. I can also accept that that wasn’t the choice either of us made, and I don’t know if either of us can or will make a different choice now, at this point in our lives and in our relationship.

It makes me wonder if my children will have the same thoughts about me. We are very close, and share a strong, loving bond. I can’t imagine not sharing my thoughts, my memories, my life and the joy I find in living, with them. But maybe, despite my best intentions, I will become a big mystery to them — a mystery they love, but a mystery nonetheless — the way my mother is a mystery to me.