I read a great article yesterday that was posted in the Huffington Post (online newspaper). It was written by blogger, Allison Tate and shared by Jennifer Stanton. Here is an excerpt that highlights the gist of her story:
...........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.
Most of us, whether we're old Moms, new grandmas, young Moms or even aunties, are guilty of favoring the behind the lens position versus front and center. Some of us don't even give it a thought as we're just plain the ones who "do it"......all! I'm an admitted photoholic. For years, I even attended meetings....we were scrapbooking but they were meeting nonetheless. I've even been known to have my camera at a funeral;-) Jeff's gift at his wedding rehearsal (ok, some photos don't make the trip to my photo hall of fame) was 5 scrapbooks full of his life to date. If I'm not mistaken, and I was once, there are less than 50 pictures of "me!" A quarter of a century with my number one guy and less than 2 photos per year (if you do the math). WTH. For many years I made scrapbooks for gifts ...for everybody......Grandmas, nieces, nephews, neighbors and even the wonderful, young men who built our Florida home. I was amazed at their sincere appreciation and joy for my capturing seemingly routine bits of their lives and making them photographically monumental. So I continue! My scrapbooking has subsided a bit since moving into our new home. Lee mentions, occasionally, that I had more totes of photos, film canisters and scrapbooking supplies than I did of kitchen and cooking paraphernalia......well... duh...You can't eat memories!
Now, I'm smack dab in the middle of the technology age. I have thousands of pictures in Kodak land, thousands now in Shutterfly, hundreds living in my iPhone and who knows how many I've actually managed to safely transport to "the cloud!" My heart is still tied to photography but my focus these days lies in the stories. I try to remember to hand the camera off for a snap or two of me and sometimes get a wee bit depressed when no one else thinks of it... but old habits die hard. Mom, (Grandma and Aunt Sandy) has always been the one to document our lives...whether it be in pictures or in prose, but maybe now's the time to say, "hey you guys, how about a picture of me ...?" Just as Allison, in all her new Mommy disarray, knows the importance of literally being in the picture, I too, need to move in front of the lens. We both have wrinkled persona's...hers might be fashion mine might be skin but our flaws are part of our personalities and should go down in history....So from now on I've decided to add a lot more "cheese" and a little less whine!!!
