I have mixed feelings when it comes to taking photos of my children. Like any proud mama, I want to capture all the big – and the small! – moments in their lives. I can’t stop time like I wish I could. It’s impossible to “freeze-frame” my children, or our family experiences, as I’ve yearned to do at many different points in their lives. Which is why it’s important to me to catch expressions, phases, and moments through photos.
At the same time … I don’t want to miss out on the prime moments because I’m always behind the camera, getting so caught up in documenting them that I’m not fully experiencing them. I’ve also seen the camera interfere with the special moments, turning my kids into third-rate actors and worse, detracting from their natural experiences, play, and emotions.
There is also the practical component – all of the work involved in photo management in this digital age! I snap a LOT of pictures each year, taken with both my iPhone and my “good” camera – and that’s not counting the hundreds of additional family pictures my husband takes on his phone that I eventually manage, too.
When my children were younger, less mobile, and still napping, it was easier to keep up with downloading, deleting all the duplicate images or out-of-focus shots, then designing digital albums or printing photo books. But then I fell behind. Um … three or so years behind. Even after slowing down on the photo-snapping, catching up and keeping up is a daunting task! But what good are the photos if I’m just dumping them onto my hard drive in a big heap of pictures to loaf around in the dark depths of iPhoto?
And so, I’ve been re-engaging in my role of family historian and photo organizer. Here are some of the photo lessons I am learning in the process:
1. Photos help show my children they matter to me.
My children love to join me in looking back on photos – regardless of whether digitally compiled or in printed albums. All kinds of conversations are prompted that show my girls, who especially love to hear about their months as babies, how much they mean to me. “You were so sleepy that first week after you were born. Look at you there – Mommy and Daddy tried everything to wake you up so that I could feed you! I remember when …” They know, through the stories and the care involved in capturing important moments in pictures, that they’re significant.
2. Photos help match-make my children to important adult attachments.
With grandparents or other relatives or friends we don’t get to see as often as we’d like, pictures help to hold them close. “Oh, look, there’s Papa holding you for the first time. You were only a few days old, and he was so excited to meet you that day.” Or, “There are the cupcakes Grandma made you on your first birthday – the same ones she makes you every year. It’s one of her favorite things to do for you.”
3. Photos help endear my children to me.
To state the obvious to any parent, the daily grind can get hard. When I feel my caring, loving parts taken over by frustration with my children, a walk down memory lane by flipping through photos is often all that’s needed to remind me of all their sweetness once again. Even if they weren’t still at the time of being photographed, they’re still in the picture, giving me a quiet moment to more fully reflect on, and appreciate, their true spirit. It fills me up and reminds me just how precious they are, how important my job of helping them grow.
4. Sorting photos into albums can be neurotically pleasing.
To be blunt, sometimes it simply feels good to indulge in one’s neuroses, sorting all the pictures of grandparents or cousins together, arranging albums by holidays and excursions, keeping separate albums of photos from Mommy-Daughter dates. There’s order, harmony, and a little bit of peace in an otherwise mostly chaotic world. It’s a nice escape!
5. Photos help me invite everything in my children.
How tempting it is, while creating albums, to cull just the happy, smiling, everybody-looking-good pictures. But what a missed opportunity! Rather than edit time with a false sense of blissful perfection, I make a point to include shots of the tantrums over mucky beach walks, the expressions of worry during a haircut, close-ups of drippy popsicles smeared on favorite outfits, images of Little Sister’s transparent bitterness while watching Big Sister open a treasured birthday gift … turned to genuine sadness in the next photo, taken just a second later. Of course, we have plenty of happy and carefree photos, too – those I don’t have to try so hard to find (or accept!). But life is full of a huge range of emotions and experiences. If I’m aiming to parent in a way that accepts it all, the photos need to reflect that, too. Conversely, when I photograph it all – the good, the bad, and the ugly – it reminds me to accept it all.
6. Photos open doorways to talk about vulnerable feelings and prime mixed feelings.
Photos, I’ve found, can be a helpful tool in creating distance – giving us room to talk about big emotions that would be too vulnerable to talk about directly or in the moment. In the spirit of casually looking through pictures and while in the context of a warm moment of attachment, I can “touch the bruises” gently and prime mixed feelings. “Oh boy, sometimes it can be so hard feeling left out,” I can say when we come across a certain photo where I can see what’s really going on underneath. Before my daughter’s brain moves to protect her by backing away from this vulnerable feeling, I’m moving on, “That was last summer when you and I ended up riding together in the paddleboat! Wasn’t that fun, just the two of us?”
7. Photos help improve my vision.
It’s often not until I look back in time, through pictures, that I can fully see and appreciate certain stages and moments. An experience captured in a photo that felt incredibly hard for us at the time, now I can see as necessary to getting us to where we are now. Things I might see now, like how sensitive my daughter is, re-frame my past understanding of her when I look back on pictures of her earlier years. It goes the other way, too. I might see something while looking back at a photo taken three years ago that helps me consider something differently now. What a gift it is to truly see my children, looking through both my camera lens and the lens of Dr. Gordon Neufeld’s paradigm.
Despite the toil involved, keeping up with our family photos is proving to be most rewarding – both capturing and creating moments of connection.
© Sara Easterly. All rights reserved.
This essay was first published as an editorial by the Seattle Neufeld Community.
