My most important photo

When I was about fifteen, I found a photograph of my mother that I had never seen before. She doesn't keep many photos of herself around, and most are from my childhood, not before. This photo was taken on a hill sometime in the mid to late 1960s; she had long flat-ironed hair, wore bell-bottoms and a tank top that showed her midriff, and she would have been about seventeen in the photo. I had always thought that I had taken more after my dad and that it was my sister who looked like my mother, but when I showed the photo to a friend, she asked me when my hair had ever been that long- she thought it was me. It wasn't until I saw this photograph that I was able to see the resemblance between my mother and me. Seeing her at about my age allowed me to feel a stronger connection to her and to get a better sense of her as a person, not simply as the "Mom" that she had been in my mind since I was born. When I look at this photo now, not only do I see my mother as a young woman, but I see a bit of myself as I was at age seventeen- long-haired, dressed in a favourite pair of old ripped bell-bottom jeans.