Photos Of All The Imposturous Moments
Life is a most wonderous, beautiful, confusing, painful, invigorating, infuriating, tornado of splendor I have ever encountered.
To live is to lay evidence to the most amazing and yet bewildering experiences of ones life.
Along with the understanding of all these notions listed above, we still yet daily must decipher, decode and unravel all of the unspoken parts of ourselves that we come into contact with. The parts that fight for our attention, that we may shame or shove back into the darkness of the filing cabinets of our minds. I have always been fascinated by people, their reactions and perceptions and I lay no bias to my own actions or thoughts. I figured myself out long ago. Because I know I am deeply emotional (beneath the surface) and that it is exacerbated by my inability to think upon the surfaces of things, needing to allow my internal dialog to find the deepest meaning to absolutely EVERYTHING, I formed certain defenses - habits if you will, to insure that what I am experiencing is not a “me” thing. Recently however, I unknowingly allowed many deep thoughts to escape this insurance policy habit and fester in my heart creating a lie.
I realized for the first time while the chaos of the house was sleeping; and whilst I reached for my camera to capture my husband forcefully cuddling our boy; that I had stopped taking photos of these very moments. I stopped because they felt imposturous. Fraudulent.
You see my soon to be six year old has a unique and intense nature all his own. He is hard and aggressive, yet sensitive and easily armed at the very hint of vulnerability or shame. We have always struggled as a family- battling many behavioral challenges that have never been sorted but rather have been aggravated to new heights in these new stages of age. His inability to back down from any situation, to humble his iron will, his first born nature and perception of himself as an adult coupled with what we suspect to be ADHD, creates battles that ware upon the heart and exhaust. There are months where we are so worn down, that for moments on end we are not ourselves. We are short, have for that time lost our spontaneity and succumb to triggers we all but thought we put to rest - and so every time my hands reached for the tool that I had been so accustomed to expressing myself through, I released my grip and somehow allowed a feeling of guilt to wash away a potential photo of a memory. I told myself, how can I share something so seemingly perfect, so seemingly effortless when the battles that wage are many? Even looking at these photos on this article tell only half truths. The vulnerability of affection makes my son want to crawl out of his skin and yet what the images tell you is something rather different.
I took them anyway and I noticed something else.
He is still happy.
He is still smiling.
He still knows we love him. Deeply.
And so I’ll remind myself to take the photo; without explanation other than that life is a complex and dynamic wave of all the things that compile against and atop each other- forming layers that one couldn’t possibly explain without being driven to absolute madness. So rather than explain, express. Take the photo- be the imposter, or don’t. Do what you will and do it for the sake of self-mastery and the ability to say to them later on “it was NEVER perfect. Not once, and yet that is why itwas and we didn’t miss it”
