brave

The other day I changed my profile picture on Facebook.  Not necessarily revolutionary, except that it was.  We have hundreds (thousands?) of digital photos saved on the computer since Wren was born 2 years ago.  And until this week I have had only one (one!) picture of me, by myself, without Wren's blue marble eyes or luke's thick, perfect ringlets to draw the attention away from me.  And this honestly would not be a problem in any sense if this were just happenstance.  But it's not.

Giving birth changed everything for me.  I'm not sure if this is a universal experience.  But for me, in the wake of these big shifts in my daily life, my personality, my friendships, my time spent and to my body, it feels incredibly vulnerable to display my self without being flanked by other lovely people.

There's a great article passing through blog-land and facebook on this very subject.  And if I'm honest, I'll admit I cried a little bit reading it.  Of course we live in a culture that tells us that ugly, lumpy, imperfect people are unimportant or inconsequential.  But we exist!  We matter to our loved ones.  We affect them and change them.  And we are of great consequence.  And that means I want to exist in our family's collective memory, even in the photographs that make me cringe.

I snapped a shot of myself hastily the other afternoon.  I sat on the floor of our bedroom and hoped Luke wouldn't walk in and catch me in my (narcissistic?) photo-shoot glory.  This is where I am and what I look like every day.  This is me.  (And a certain someone who's glorious curls couldn't be cropped out.)  I uploaded it to the computer and saved it as a file titled brave.

So when all is said and done, if I can't do it for myself, I want to do it for my kids. I want to be in the picture, to give them that visual memory of me. I want them to see how much I am here, how my body looks wrapped around them in a hug, how loved they are (Allison Tate).