(You Already Knew That) This is How I Look

As the main photographer for our family, I am usually the one behind the camera and am rarely in the pictures.  This summer at the beach I noticed that my brother Jeff, also a camera enthusiast, seemed to be pointing his camera in my direction one afternoon.  Later when I was out playing in the water with my sisters and sister in laws, Russ took some pictures.

 

When I saw the pictures I was dismayed.

I look so fat!

My posture is terrible!

Does my belly really stick out that much?

I look terrible with wet hair!

The thoughts started there and kept going in that direction.  In fact, my first instinct was to delete the pictures.  I always think this when I see pictures of myself, but I usually resist the temptation to hit the delete key.

This summer as I looked at the pictures I told myself—

it’s not like I can stop playing in the ocean

and

everyone else already knows that this is what I look like when I am playing in the ocean. 

(And now you know too!)

So I’m keeping the pictures.  I don’t think I’ll blow them up real big and put them on the wall, but I’m keeping them.

~~~~~

When my mom was dying I made scrapbooks of all of our family’s pictures.  My brother Jeff & I spent hours sorting through a lifetime’s worth of pictures, trying to put them in something close to chronological order. 

One of my favorite pictures was my mom’s “glamour shot.”  I love this picture because I think it was the first time in many years that my mom had felt truly beautiful.  I loved the pictures from the glamour shot and I loved my mom’s delight with them.

But the other pictures that I love are probably not pictures that my mom loved.

I love the pictures that show the mom I remember. 

The pictures that she probably told my dad he shouldn’t have taken.

I never look at these pictures and analyze their faults.  I look at them and a place in my heart sighs and says…

there is my mom—just how she was.

They make me happy.

 

~~~~~

 

I will keep the pictures from the beach this year.  And I will keep handing off the camera to someone else so that I appear in more of the pictures.

One day I will be gone, and my children and grandchildren will be able to remember me when they look at these pictures.  Somehow I think they will not notice so much that I looked like a (happy) drowned rat.

I think that they will, instead, talk about how much I loved going to the beach.  And that I was always happiest while in the ocean. 

I hope the pictures will make them happy…