The kids and I stared at the computer, watching the download bar creep across the screen. It was the middle of winter and we were waiting to relive our summer at the lake by finally scrolling through the hundreds of pictures that had been stored on my camera. We talked of warm, sunny days, their dad grilling, me driving the boat and pulling them on a tube for hours on end. Then the computer chirped and we started to scroll. We clicked through photo after photo of the kids, family and friends. About 100 pictures in, a close-up flashed onscreen.
“There you are mom!” my son said with surprise, since I am usually taking the photos, not appearing in them.
Who is this?
That can’t be me.
This isn’t the person I’d imagined as we shared summer stories.
I surveyed the image of this familiar stranger, sitting on the boat, hair blowing wildly in all directions, smiling and squinting in the sun.
What I saw was uneven skin tone, lack of makeup, and wrinkles – LOTS of them.
The lyrics from Rod Stewart’s Maggie May, popped into my head, “The morning sun, when it’s in your face really shows your age.” The person in the photo looked a lot older than I did, by at least 20 years.
I muttered something about it being an awful picture and moved the cursor to delete.
My preteen and teen daughters both shouted in unison, “Mom no!!!”
“Mom, don’t delete that,” my 14-year-old son said with a surprising adult-like sternness.
My finger hovered over the mouse, ready to click.
“Why would you delete it?” my oldest daughter asked.
I looked again at myself on that bright, high resolution, mega-pixel screen.
What should I say? That this wasn’t the 30-year-old I had trapped in my mind staring back at us so I needed to delete her? That everything I lectured to them about beauty on the inside and photoshop frenzied images was just not true? That beauty IS only skin deep? That I needed a photoshop session? (Yes, I really needed one)
“I just don’t like it,” was all I could muster.
“It’s a great picture of you though!” she said.
My finger twitched –
And I was pulled into a moment when I was 9 or 10 years old, looking through a stack of pictures with my mom. I had found a black and white photo of mom, standing with her sisters. Mom was hugely pregnant. She took one look and said, “Oh God, that is simply awful! I look terrible!”
I didn’t understand. It was just a picture of mom with my aunts – and she was pregnant. Mom picked up the picture and promptly tore it up.
“Why did you do that?” my voice shocked into a shout.
“Because it’s just a bad picture of me.”
I looked at myself on the screen and I started to see. I was focusing on the wrong details. The wind is blowing my hair, I am not posed. The sunlight means it was a beautiful summer day and I look – well – relaxed and happy. I am smiling. I thought of the photograph of mom, torn to pieces. There were probably a dozen “awful” details she saw in that photo. But I remember the important one. It couldn’t have been a bad picture, because I remember, she was smiling too.
