Amidst a day full of hard emotions — making some silly selfies brought me to a place of presence I wasn’t expecting.
A day that seemed to just barely inch along; most days felt that way, but the bottle striking, single half hour daily naps, and solo parenting for weeks on end were stacking up and pushing me to my limits.
He didn’t want to be anywhere but in my arms, and I wanted to be anywhere but there and felt endlessly guilty for it.
Six months of mothering and I still searched wildly for the mother within, but all I found was my scattered and disconnected self, a bond that felt brittle and thoughts constantly swirling around ‘you’re going to fuck him up…you’ve probably already done so.’
I feared he could feel it, an emptiness, and I worried as he grew, all he’d come to know and find would be a physical shell of a person — just a pair of arms to hold him with, a warm body to be close to but nothing in the shape of motherly love.
A half year gone and I’d barely picked up my camera…it taunted me from behind the glass of the dry box each time I walked by — a reminder that my days didn’t look or feel like the beautiful frames I’d scroll through. The frames that seemed to be saying ‘you’re not cut out for this.’
Perhaps that sounds ridiculous — to hold myself up to a social media platform. I knew it sounded ridiculous. But those were the photos I’d spent 9 months devouring as both a photographer of new motherhood and a woman approaching motherhood and I couldn’t help but fall for the narrative I was soaking up — motherhood looks and feels a certain way.
Sure, heaps of snapshots were overtaking my iPhone but nothing made that remembered less about inching through the days and more about making something of the days. Nothing that satisfied that rising need, desperate really, to create something that felt true in the mess. Something that didn’t make me feel like a fraud as a mother and a photographer.
I was afraid to be seen even by myself in those early mothering days and to pick up my camera felt like more than I could handle and so we passed the time with silly selfies in the afternoon light that streamed into our bedroom where he was supposed to be napping. Even if just a small effort to quell the pressure to document the half year mark — as if it would be another failing as a mother to let this life marker fade into oblivion like so many others.
Somewhere along the way though, with my arm tight around this little creature and him snuggled up against me I started to sink into presence — the noise in my head quieted for an instant. And what I started to capture was something deeper.
What I’d been afraid to see was actually exactly what I needed to see — us with my own eyes.
To know that it wasn’t about capturing some feeling out there.
Or looking a certain way.
Or being anyone other than me and us and what that was.
It was about our own journey together and even the hint of sadness I could see in my eyes was part of it and the juxtapositions of holding close and feeling far apart.
We were becoming us and that was what was beautiful.
The shift was right there in this frame. It was about the /g r o w I n g/ bond. For the first time I could understand I wasn’t just /a/ mother with her baby boy, I was, am, /his/ mother.
I caught a glimpse of the mother I didn’t believe was there. We were our own duo in a flicker of calm and we were just at the beginning of our story together.
This little moment held onto and stretched out and extended beyond the difficult bits screamed that moments like this do make it all worth it, that in fact make our little world together pretty darn magnificent, and that little soul is so full of love and happiness perhaps because *I* poured it into him from my depths.
That perhaps it is this:
“Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.”
— Rumi
The tenderness, the connection, the love was illuminated because I let go of all the expectations I’d been holding on to. And even if those moments of clarity disappear as quickly as they come this frame could be a safeguard for how I felt that day.
A reminder of how creating led me to presence and presence led me into the depths of our bond.