The photographer asked if I had had a chance yet to look at the pictures she had sent.
I didn’t know that they had come.
I sat holding my breath as I opened the gallery on my phone, but at 10 minutes in, the dam was in danger of rupturing.
My whole world was there in my palm.
Two daughters’ senior photos. Hundreds of gorgeous shots of them, showing the world the way I always see them:
Beaming, glowing, deep, pensive,
bursting with life and deep thoughts.
I am shaking as I scroll through them all.
Their faces are ones I have memorized at all ages, but who are these women suddenly before me?
Weren’t they both just so small?
I remember them placed, brand new and warm onto my chest.
I bear the memory of them in permanent stretch marks on my own body.
I remember wondering what I know now: Who they’d become.
If you handed me one, I could tell you whose lost tooth it was because I have memorized every part of them, every micro-expression.
This is my life’s work.
These beautiful beings are the story of me being poured out.
They are the parts of me that stretched, healed, and broke.
Nothing has mattered outside of them.
I looked at the pictures, and I physically shook.
This.
This is the evidence of the sleepless nights being worth it,
and of thousands of tearful prayers that no one even knew were whispered in the dark.
The light hits them, and I see my treasures.
If there had to be a favorite photo of each of them, I’d never be able to choose just one.
I know that smile.
It’s the one she does when she sees a baby,
or an elderly couple that is still madly in love.
That face there?
I know exactly what she was thinking because no one understands one another like us.
I know that behind that smile that one is doing, her heart is tied in a knot
over worries about her boyfriend going away to school without her.
Every time I ask her if she’s excited to graduate, she says, “Kind of,” and I know that the thought of her best friend being far away is consuming all her innermost thoughts.
She tries to imagine not having dinners with his family every Friday night.
She thinks of not driving over there at all.
The photographer told her to smile in those woods, and I know she felt like just another one of the trees that day,
as another ring formed around that aching part of her soul.
See that girl in the grass?
She often feels hidden in ways no one gets because she is so beautiful,
but sometimes looks make people think they know what they’re getting, while the real her stays a mystery underneath. She moves quietly.
I will look at this one and think of all the ways I have always searched for her.
These senior pictures feel like a finish line that I’m collapsing at;
A race I doubted myself during,
and sometimes felt like I’d actually die from;
But there they are in print:
My girls. My beautiful girls…
One with the earth, and with past, and with future.
Their faces, to me, like the promise of God.
No one warns you when you’re raising your children of the hidden big moments you will have one day, in the quiet of your heart.
They come along when you least expect them.
They don’t tell you that one day one of the biggest ones will happen when you are looking at their senior photos
in a quiet house,
with your lukewarm coffee,
and your greying hair,
and that that moment might make you suddenly feel the most things of all.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
