Mom in the picture

Have you read the article, The Mom stays in the Picture  from the Huffington post?  If you haven’t, click here and read.  You'll love it. 

I love it.  Love how she so perfectly put into words some feelings I have about photographing moms with their kids and how important it is. 

I’ve tried to get over how lame I feel when I hand someone else the camera and ask them to take some pictures of me with my kids.  I want my kids to see me with them, see me laughing and smiling, sitting in the sun.  I want my motherhood captured.  I want to stop looking at my flaws in the pictures and start looking at the love and happiness that’s the subtext, the background for these photos.  When my kids are grown and I’m truly old and they are doing what I’m doing now I want them to see me doing it.  Being there, in the moment.  But I also want to take pictures with my children because it gives me a vision of the life I’m trying to lead, the mom I’m trying to be.  It helps me to see the big picture of what I’m trying to accomplish. 

As a photographer I always insist on taking pictures of moms with their children.  The moms are always the ones behind the camera.  Sometimes the moms protest, but I push it.  As I edit the photos I’m overcome by the love that spills out of the images.  I find them stunning and am always surprised  when I view them with a client and they cringe.  We moms have such a hard time looking past what we don’t like about ourselves in pictures.  Why do we do that to ourselves?  I love what she says in that article, our kids don’t see our love handles or the double chins or the big noses.  They just see the love. How silly it is to shy away from capturing our motherhood because we aren’t presented perfect in the pictures.  When we look beyond that we see so much beauty and it helps us reframe our lives.  

I wrote about my feelings on this in depth back here.  This snapshot of Charlie and me really changed the way I view my motherhood.  Photographs are powerful.  I love them.

So, while we were at the hunting lodge with Noah and Kristi that perfectly lush day I asked Kristi to snap some photos of me with the kids.  Once I get past my insecurities about how I look I love what I see.  Love. Joy.  Happiness.  Delighting in a moment together. 

I

I was there.  We lived that moment together.  We were all smiling and laughing.  I know I’ll want to hop back into those pictures one day when it’s all over.  And I know that feeling will ache inside me, but at the same time I know it will fill me with joy.  Joy that I lived that moment once, long ago.