SWK: The One That Started It All

Before there was a category on this blog called Snapshots, there was one specific snapshot.

I mean an actual instant print, white-bordered, slightly dusty now from where it’s been sitting on the side of the fridge. You’d find it under an already chipped magnet that holds a little tile with Calvin’s fingerprints in the shape of a heart. ‘I LOVE YOU’ scrawled around it.

Now, for the sake of this blog post, it’s been pulled down and placed on my kitchen table where I can really get a good look at it. And here’s what I remember most about that day in particular:

It's E's birthday. She was the little girl Rachael nannied back then and she was an utter delight, and Rachael adored her. 

I'm in sunglasses, which tells you everything about how much sleep I was running on that year, and the baggiest, softest theBurg tee shirt because I was postpartum and that girl  in the photo might not look it, but she was very much slowly inching back from the throes of severe PPD and anxiety.

Calvin's under a year old in it. He's not smiling. He’s got his dad’s resting grump face. I take no responsibility for that, though apparently the story goes that I came out with a pout. My Nanny swore up and down that when she saw me at the hospital I had the most pitiful pout on my lips, like I was irritated that I had to even come out and do the life thing already. Either way, Calvin is my child with the same little quirks we share, along with the whole almost 9 months and giving birth thing. (Motherhood may be considered a common experience, but there is no common way to do it, I’ve learned).

Calvin’s just completely unbothered. Probably watching the bigger kids play and already plotting the social strategy for when he finally gets mobile. That baby is  completely unaware he's about to become the reason his mother keeps a whole category on her blog. I'm the one smiling big enough for both of us, which, looking back, was probably true of most of that year (2019). Even if sometimes I pulled a fake it til you make it smile, which was probably about 60% of what my smile was that day.

The rest was me, just ‘white-knuckling’ motherhood. And she spotted it back then, because OF COURSE SHE DID. That was Rachael.

Rachael took the photo. She demanded she take a photo of me with my baby. I look back at that and am forever grateful she demanded and I being sleep-deprived and serotonin-deficient just accepted. She handed me the photo and I watched the ghostly image bloom over the surface amid the noise of E, somewhere having the time of her life. I remember the party in pieces — the balloons and tassel banner,  putting a kid’s Capri Straw into the pouch while Calvin clung to me and my shirt like a lifeline, our friend Lucas somewhere off-frame chasing E with bubbles— but the actual click, I've lost. That's the part that memory won't hand back no matter how many times I go looking for it.

What I do know is what the photo became. She gave it to me that day, printed instantly, no explanation and she let the picture make its own case. And it did. I looked at it later and saw something I couldn't see from inside my own life that year: a tired woman in sunglasses at a toddler's birthday party, being held onto by a baby who wouldn't stay that size no matter how tightly either of us tried.

That's the whole point of Snapshots, if I'm honest. Rachael didn't think the big days were the only ones worth documenting. She thought the in-between ones were —a random play date at the Chickfila Play Place (RIP, iykyk), a picnic in the living room, a fun activity Rachael had whipped up so we could talk while the kiddos crafted. She built a whole practice out of catching what nobody else flagged as important, then handing it back to you later like evidence: Hey so,  this happened, you were there, look how unposed and real it actually was.  I’m proud of you for showing up.

My baby Calvin isn't a baby anymore. He’s moving into second grade and my last baby is going off to Kindergarten. E and Lucas are big kids in their own right. Life is just…marching on and I tell you that I didn’t believe people when they told me the days are long, but the years are short until after I got out of the newborn stage with both boys. 

Because now, I look at my photos with a jolt of urgency. A vivid reminder for me that I won’t ever get that moment with Calvin as a baby again. It makes me incredibly grateful to live in the age of sharing and image and video tech so I can still pull up a video of him and hear his little voice and giggle. But it also makes me so much more aware of the passage of time.

Rachael isn't here to keep taking the pictures or even to encourage me to keep taking the pictures.  Because the truth is, we were so much better documenting for others than for ourselves. But I realize that I’m gonna have to be consistent in capturing the in-between moments that Rachael saw. 

 But the point is this— this whole post series exists because a friend once caught me off guard at a little girl's birthday party and decided, without asking permission, that the moment was worth keeping. And I wish more than anything I could tell her thank you for that moment.

Because she saw a new mama friend hiding her struggle, and she wanted to show her that even the hardest moments can have snaps of joy and whimsy in them. And truthfully, I think she knew I’d treasure the memory itself and the intention behind it.

So, that’s the story behind Snapshots Worth Keeping. This year has been a hard one to look at directly most days. But I'm doing what she taught me to do with the hard ones — not looking away, just letting myself really look and remember and reflect— one unposed, overexposed, slightly dusty polaroid photo at a time.