Thankful #11

Thankful #11: My Mother's Favorite Hobby

I'm known to have a horrible memory. Luckily, I seemed to have surrounded myself with people who can remind me of different times of my life. Brandi in middle school, Michelle and Kayleigh in high school and Amanda all the time after. These people with minds like steel traps. I don't know how they do it. Sometimes they recall a hysterical story in which I played a major part and I shrug my shoulders, unable to believe that I really did that, lived that, because I can't remember. It's my least favorite thing about myself. Some time's it feels as if I never lived at all.

Its a genetic thing. My mother can't remember anything and neither can my Mema.

I think that's why my Mother took up photography so that she would never forget the smiles on her children's face, each impossibly awkward phase captured and cherished for always.

I wonder about the future, a hundred years from now. I hope our love of photography is passed down from my children to theirs and so forth. If our pictures are well preserved, future generations will have a very detailed look at my life. My Mother has documented my life with a precise dedication, whether out of habit or because she knew, like her, my memory was doomed.

I grew up with a camera in my face. While her skill have tremendously improved over the years, every stage of learning to me was amazing, her talent only growing, passing expectations I never had.

Every Christmas morning, my brothers and I would have to get up, brush our hair and wait for her to get the camera ready. Then we would have to file down the stairs, one at a time, and make great exaggerated faces of surprise at what Santa had left. These pictures are hysterical now and I foresee myself doing the exact same thing to our children.

I have always been beautiful in my Mother's pictures. Growing up knowing your photograph could be taken at any moment, you learn a defense mechanism of being ready at all times.

I am much more beautiful in pictures than I am in real life and I'm perfectly fine with that.

I am much, much more beautiful in my Mother's pictures. Probably because it's nothing but love coming forth from her, enjoying her hobby as much as she enjoys capturing me and my family and my friends on film. My own child, captured with such a delicate beauty, I can't help but think how lucky I am to have this gift in my life.

It's her way to blend in, to have a part in all the chaos without actually having to be a part of it. A way to get to know people through the safety of her lens. An outside observer,

a creative eye. These things are all my Mother.

I know so many are thankful for her talent and her selflessness in sharing. Her friends and their family,, every season captured on film. My best friend, her adopted daughter, her wedding captured forever, her presence an important part. So much she has done with this gift yet she is neither boastful or self-important. It is never enough in her eyes. Yet in ours, it is everything.

So I am thankful for all the things I remember through the eyes of her pictures, because without them, those memories would leave my mind like a wisp of smoke, dissipating as the years wore on.

It is more than just photographs. They are pieces of her for me to cherish and pass on. She is in every picture just as much as I am.

I, like her, have my identity based in photographs. Something to leave behind, a proof of our having lived; documented happiness.

Because even forced, exaggerated smiles turn into rolling laughter, perfectly recalled stories and a history that will link us all together.

I will never be able to thank her enough.