This picture isn't for me.

Why I stopped saying no when asked to say cheese.

(click play if you’d like to hear me read this piece aloud to you)

Recently, I began to notice there are a lot more pictures of my husband and my son than there are of me. (There are exponentially even more of our pets, but, c’mon, that just stands to reason.) At first, this realization hurt. 

“Why are there so many photos of them, but so few of me?” I wondered.

Sure, some of it is because I tend to be the one who takes the actual pictures (I am a mom, after all), but (an even bigger) part of it is because I haven’t allowed them to be taken. I would literally say no when one of them would open the camera app on their phone.

“No, not now. I look awful.”

“No, no, my hair is a mess.”

“No, I look too (insert self-loathing comment here).”

So, understandably, there are fewer pictures of me in our shared Google photo albums. 

Thoughts turn to people I love who are no longer here; my mom being one of them. Since she 1) died when I was a little girl and 2) lived in a time before being able to literally take 50 digital photos in the span of a couple seconds was even a thing (remember actual film?), I have very few pictures of her. And in the handful I have of just the two of us? My head is turned away from the camera in most of them. Yep, that’s me, dodging pictures since way back when. 

My heart aches with having so few pictures of my mom, so now I think of my son. What if something happens to me today? Tomorrow? What then?

This picture is his favorite picture of me; one he took himself. 

Do I like this picture? Here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter if I like it or not. 

This picture isn’t for me.

It’s for him. He took it. He loves it. 

Sooner than I like to even consider, my son is going to head out into this world all on his own. We won’t see each other every day, like we do now. So when he misses me (he’s gonna miss me, right?!), he has a picture to keep me close, if even in the tiniest of ways. 

While I still say no to a lot of things (look, I’m closer to 50 than to 40 now, so I want to be in my jammies by 8 pm and in bed by 9), saying no to a picture? That’s just not one of them.