My neighbor posted
this article on Facebook and I really liked it. I had been thinking lately that I'm not in a lot of pictures that I take with my family. I usually hide behind the camera. Some of it is because I don't like the way I look. I have decided that through the holiday seasons I am going to make sure I am in more of the pictures. I want my son to look back and see that I was there with him.
I challenge everyone to try and take more pictures of your lives and make sure you are in those pictures.
Last weekend, my family traveled to attend my oldest niece's Sweet
Sixteen party. My brother and sister-in-law planned this party for many
months and intended it to be a big surprise, and it included a photo
booth for the guests.
I showed up to the party a bit late and, as usual, slightly askew
from trying to dress myself and all my little people for such a special
night out. I'm still carrying a fair amount of baby weight and wearing a
nursing bra, and I don't fit into my cute clothes. I felt awkward and
tired and rumpled.
I was leaning my aching back against the bar, my now 5-month-old baby
sleeping in a carrier on my chest (despite the pounding bass and dulcet
tones of LMFAO blasting through the room) when my 5-year-old son ran up
to me.
"Come take pictures with me, Mommy," he yelled over the music, "in the photo booth!"
I hesitated. I avoid photographic evidence of my existence these
days. To be honest, I avoid even mirrors. When I see myself in pictures,
it makes me wince. I know I am far from alone; I know that many of my
friends also avoid the camera.
It seems logical. We're sporting mama bodies and we're not as young
as we used to be. We don't always have time to blow dry our hair, apply
make-up, perhaps even bathe (ducking). The kids are so much cuter than
we are; better to just take their pictures, we think.
But we really need to make an effort to get in the picture. Our sons
need to see how young and beautiful and human their mamas were. Our
daughters need to see us vulnerable and open and just being ourselves --
women, mamas, people living lives. Avoiding the camera because we don't
like to see our own pictures? How can that be okay?
Too much of a mama's life goes undocumented and unseen. People,
including my children, don't see the way I make sure my kids' favorite
stuffed animals are on their beds at night. They don't know how I walk
the grocery store aisles looking for treats that will thrill them for a
special day. They don't know that I saved their side-snap, paper-thin
baby shirts from the hospital where they were born or their little
hospital bracelets in keepsake boxes high on the top shelves of their
closets. They don't see me tossing and turning in bed wondering if I am
doing an okay job as a mother, if they are okay in their schools, where
we should take them for a vacation, what we should do for their
birthdays. I'm up long past the news on Christmas Eve wrapping presents
and eating cookies and milk, and I spend hours hunting the Internet and
the local Targets for specially-requested Halloween costumes and
birthday presents. They don't see any of that.
Someday, I want them to see me, documented, sitting right there
beside them: me, the woman who gave birth to them, whom they can thank
for their ample thighs and their pretty hair; me, the woman who nursed
them all for the first years of their lives, enduring porn star-sized
boobs and leaking through her shirts for months on end; me, who ran
around gathering snacks to be the week's parent reader or planning the
class Valentine's Day party; me, who cried when I dropped them off at
preschool, breathed in the smell of their post-bath hair when I read
them bedtime stories, and defied speeding laws when I had to rush them
to the pediatric ER in the middle of the night for fill-in-the-blank
(ear infections, croup, rotavirus).
I'm everywhere in their young lives, and yet I have very few pictures of me
with
them. Someday I won't be here -- and I don't know if that someday is
tomorrow or thirty or forty or fifty years from now -- but I want them
to have pictures of me. I want them to see the way I looked at them, see
how much I loved them. I am not perfect to look at and I am not perfect
to love, but I am perfectly their mother.
When I look at pictures of my own mother, I don't look at cellulite
or hair debacles. I just see her -- her kind eyes, her open-mouthed,
joyful smile, her familiar clothes. That's the mother I remember. My
mother's body is the vessel that carries all the memories of my
childhood. I always loved that her stomach was soft, her skin freckled,
her fingers long. I didn't care that she didn't look like a model. She
was my mama.
So when all is said and done, if I can't do it for myself, I want to
do it for my kids. I want to be in the picture, to give them that visual
memory of me. I want them to see how much I am here, how my body looks
wrapped around them in a hug, how loved they are.
I will save the little printed page with four squares of pictures on
it and the words "Morgan's Sweet Sixteen" scrawled across the top with
the date. There I am, hair not quite coiffed, make-up minimal, face
fuller than I would like -- one hand holding a sleeping baby's head, and
the other wrapped around my sweet littlest guy, who could not care less
what I look like.
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