Watching the torrent of Mother Love pouring through social media yesterday like a flood, I couldn’t help but think of my mother, and I looked up at this photo, which hangs above my desk in my study.

It’s the only photo I have of her, and the only one I have of us.

I look at this four-year-old boy and his mom, both of them so easy and happy together, it is hard to believe that it is me, or her. I don’t remember either of us being happy for a minute.

But perhaps I’ve just forgotten.

I gave up looking at the Mother’s Day Love-A-Thon. I don’t trust Facebook much anyway –  many people use it to look good to other people, I rarely see much truth up there –  the love stream never ended, I wondered what it meant to all those mothers getting the plaudits and digital smooches my mother would have loved but never got.

I don’t want to be cynical. I do wonder if all those gushes were true.

It’s hard for me to remember my mother.

I think of her as being stylish, attractive, although I rarely saw her smile. She was very bright, very direct, very creative. She was very anxious.

From the first, she pegged me as a writer and loved my writing.

She bragged about me much too much. But she could never bring herself to fight for me or my sister. That was not what women did then.

She loved to cook, entertain, and bargain shop. She loved art and classy old antiques. She and her friends went through the bargains in Filene’s basement like hungry dogs chasing a steak.

These two in the photo look so close, so content. The picture must have been taken at a beach.

I suppose towards the beginning of life, in the excitement of just beginning, people are happier and not yet as worn down as life can so often leave them. My mother and I look so fresh and content.

Life is rarely easy, and never simple, but at times, it can be pure and hopeful and innocent. I am struck by the carefree look on my face, that is not the anxious, fearful bedwetting and friendless child I remember being. It is startling when I look at that happy fence, it makes me shiver at what was to come.

In my therapy, I often went back in my mind to talk to this boy, this early version of me. It’s okay, I kept telling him, don’t worry, it turned out all right. I got the girl. He smiled and gave me the biggest hug. I said I would keep visiting him.

This was the therapist’s idea, she talked about the need for integrated selves, for the current me to know the little boy and reassure him.

She said these two parts of me didn’t know each other, and I said yes, this is true, sometimes I feel like a five-year-old boy with a big farm, a book tour, a blog, and a book contract.

I think we know one another now, he and I. But I remember apologizing to him for leaving him alone back there, and then I blinked and thought how dumb was that!  He was me. How could I have left him alone?

But I never thought of going back to my mother to talk to her. The closest I came was when Maria and I went to a cemetery outside of Providence together and I went to my mother’s gravesite and told her about Maria, and how happy I was.

I told her that I thought she would love Maria, but I didn’t say that I doubted that Maria would love her. My mother was not easy to bear, I could never really figure out how to do it without getting angry or anxious.

I worked hard to raise my daughter differently, I wanted her to live happily and independently from me. I got that wish, which is affirming but sometimes bittersweet.

I wasn’t lying to the former little me, he was a cute kid. I am happy, and things did turn out well for me. I hoped it helped him to know that, to look ahead. I don’t write this as a lament, but more as a reflection of a part of my life I will just never understand.

I did fight my way to a better place than I deserved or imagined, it took decades, really. My mother was convinced that the therapists were turning me against here. You know those people, she said, they always blame the mother.

 My brother never told me that my mother had moved to a funky apartment near the Providence waterfront, she hated the assisted care place where she was. She told me the place was filled with zombies, and the food was not edible.

All I knew about her new apartment was that she was found dead on the floor, her heart had finally given out. She was 88. She had given up on calling me by then.

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In the photo, my smile seems natural to me, my mothers seems a little posed. Every photo I ever saw of my family showed everyone grinning from ear to ear. But that was a false front like I imagine Facebook often to be, nobody grinned much at home.

I just don’t remember her smiling like that. She was usually very busy and worried. My mother cooked, cleaned, shopped, took care of the kids as was the custom for women in that time. On top of that, she ran a gift shop by herself.

She always worked, keeping books in my uncle’s custom drape business before opening up her own gift shop, specializing in Scandanavian pottery. I think I know why I stopped looking so carefree, it was just a short time after that photo was taken.

I think I was jealous of all those Facebook love notes to mothers. I would have liked to write a message like those to my mother, and believe them. I recognize that she helped me to get the things I always wanted, I’ve always recognized a piece of her in me. And I am so grateful for my life, it will not end the way her life did.

I think real Motherhood is so much more complicated than Facebook messages reveal. You would think no kid had ever struggled with his or her mother, reading those messages on Mother’s Day. Facebook does not promote authenticity.

My mother never showed me this picture. After she died, my brother, who I rarely speak with,  sent me an album she kept of just about everything I ever wrote.

A Jon Katz album. She was proud of me, I do know that, and the album reflects that, about 20 or 30 clippings from newspaper stories and reviews of my books.

It was stained and dog-eared, she must have read and re-read it in those years before her death, the years I didn’t see her.

It did break my heart, when I saw it, I remember thinking, oh, mom, whatever did you people do to me to make me feel so badly about you that I had to run away like that?