The unflinching stare into the camera lens belongs to a 12-year-old, who had just struggled with having a curling tongs, heated in a fireplace, used on her hair.
Having lost the battle on one (her right) side, my mother, who, despite growing up in challenging circumstances and being quite image conscious, threatened to burn her hair if her mother insisted on doing the other side.
The price of this defiance was to have her Confirmation framed with a lopsided hairstyle, for eternity.
Did my mother regret, as she posed on that elegant chaise longue, with her beautiful white dress carefully extended across the seating, her shoes gleaming in the studio light, her socks barely crumpled – like a character out of an Enid Blyton book – that she had not given in on her hair?
Was she thinking at that precious moment of image capture – still rare in Ireland in the 1930s – that her hair would blight the memory forever, or was she prepared to pay that price in order to make her point?
Was my grandmother – a gifted seamstress who would have planned the dress as part of ensemble to be crowned by wavy hair, in anticipation of making a grand impact anywhere they had planned to go that day – reflecting, during the long silent tram ride from Kilmainham, on a suitable punishment for an assertive child?
Which brings me back to my mother’s stare.
There is definitely a trace of confidence – another of her hallmarks – but also a sense of holding back tears; a sense of an important event being wrecked? And probably fear of the punishment her mother might be planning.
Yet my mother, barely on the cusp of adolescence, was certain of her right to be seen and heard: values that she passed on to her sons, and we have passed on to the next generation.
This picture is a testimonial to her conviction that even, in those dark days of absolute parental authority, children had rights over what happened to their bodies.
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