"Mommy, let's take a picture!" my youngest child yells.
"That's fine, baby, but make sure I'm not in it."
"Come on," he whines, drawing out the last word in a huff of exhalation.
"Okay, fine," as I acquiesce, knowing full well that once we've taken the picture of ourselves, I'll go into the camera app and delete it.
[whrrp] is the sound the app makes as it deletes the photo. And, like that, the picture is gone. With it, a memory.
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In this picture I'm the slightly
more girly version of SNL's Pat.
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I don't know when I started to hate pictures but it's been decades. I posed for my fair amount of photographs as a kid for my father who counted "photographer" as one of many of his careers in life. In every picture after age 12 months or so, what I see is a kid with dimpled knees, dimpled thighs, dimpled cheeks, and a round belly and bad hair painstakingly curled and ratted by my mother with a hot iron, hair spray, and ribboned plastic barrettes.
When I think of myself as a child, this is who I see.
