I know you don’t like it when I tell you to smile and look at the camera. You’re sitting there doing something cute or at a school function or talking with friends and all of a sudden MOM interrupts and says, “SMILE!”
How embarrassing, right?
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I will never live this one down. |
I was the same way when I was your age. There was nothing
worse to me than posing for a photo – those split seconds of motionless
uncomfortableness while my mom fumbled with the camera were enough to make my
smile turn into a frown and ruin whatever memory of me she was trying to capture,
until she just gave up and snapped the picture that would haunt me at
Thanksgiving dinners for the rest of my life.
But do me a favor. Just grin and bear it.
I NEED these photos of you, and someday, you will too.
Especially when I ask someone to take a picture of you and me together. Or I
make you pose for that selfie and you accuse me of trying to be “cool.” I’m
not. I want a picture of you and me – to remember these moments with you years
from now, and so you can look back on them when I'm gone.
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Yep, that's me. Probably summer of '68? |
I don’t have a whole lot of pictures of my mom and me
together. Sure, there’s the collection of tattered black and whites and grainy
colored photos from when I was little: Mom playing with me in the sandbox, Mom
reading me a story, Mom presenting me with my homemade birthday cake.
But as I got older, the photos with the two of us became rarer.
Opportunities just didn’t present themselves, or she was the one behind the
camera snapping the moments and milestones in her daughter’s life. In fact, the
last couple of photos I have of the two of us are selfies I took during her hospitalization. Some might find that inappropriate, but I cherish those photos because
it was probably the closest I’ve ever felt to her and I wanted to remember it.
Maybe I was making up for lost time.
Trust me – someday you’ll want to look back on photos of
yourself in different stages of your life. There will be spotty, cloudy
memories that will be made clear with an image that will take you right back to
that place in your life. They’ll make you smile, and they’ll make you cry. The
collection of photos I have of you will be my legacy to you when I’m no longer
here to snap them.
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Son's idea of "posing for the camera." |
And someday, you’ll search through them for the ones of you
and me. You’ll covet those the most, whether I have you in a headlock because you
won’t look at the camera or if we were lucky enough to have someone snap a
moment in time when neither of us was looking.
That’s why I take your picture. It’s why I take our picture.
Know that I do it because I love you and I want to remember you, I want you to
remember me, and I want you to remember us.