Words about pictures

(Dad, you might not want to read this until your Father’s Day present shows up or else the surprise will be ruined.)

This week, I’ve been using my spare time to put together a photobook of the first six months of our transition. I’ve been pouring through pictures and the memories that come along with the pictures. It has been good work and also difficult. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, (which means I’ve likely gotten my proportions all wrong on this blog) but it’s also worth thousands of memories. For each of the pictures, there are a rush of thoughts and ideas and emotions. The party at Joyce and Mary’s house in the summer, feeling the joys of working and playing with fantastic colleagues. The trips to the Smithsonian—a world of art and culture and history at our doorstep. The layers of the renovation project on Belmont Road. The sparkling perfection of that house when we were through. The hundreds of dinners with family and friends that infused the dining room. The lovely neighborhoods we used to walk through. The day we feared for our safety in Rock Creek Park and figured Perry saved us. As I walk through my life here, I can almost believe that that other life is a dream, that it happened to a person in another time, another world. And when I see the pictures, I remember that that life happened to me.

And each picture holds for a moment not only the beauty of that picture, but also the fears and joys and expectations of that moment. I look back and see times when I wasn’t sure that particular pieces of my life would work out, and I feel the ghost of that nervousness even as I exorcize because I know better now. I want to reach in to my self in those pictures and whisper, “Loosen up, I’ve read the next chapter and you’ll be fine.” And I see other pictures where I had no idea that there was something bad ahead, and I’m blissfully thinking of something else. I’m interested that I have no warnings I’d like to mutter in the ear of an unsuspecting me, and there’s something to learn from that. Would it be better to know which things would all fall apart (“go to custard” is the phrase here, although I still don’t understand why that’s bad) or is ignorance bliss really? And, if I want myself to loosen up over the things that didn’t go bad and not to worry or know about the things that would go bad, what message does that send me here to the images of myself that were taken this week or last that I’ll put in a photo book months or years from now?

When I was pregnant, I’d look at baby pictures of my little brother and see in those pictures the big boy he was then. I was excited to peer into my little baby’s face and imagine the big boy or girl that would grow from these infant beginnings. When Naomi was born, I would stare into her wise old new face and wonder what she’d look like. There were moments when I’d feel a stab of fear in my inability to imagine my way into her future. Was that an omen?

But no, the new-mother hormones had just cut off that part of my brain that knows that the plotline is easy to trace backwards, and impossible to trace forwards. That’s what makes novels (and also life) worth the work. Now I look at her baby pictures and see the shape of her eyes, the curve of her laughing mouth. I look at Aidan, hugely fat as an infant, and can make out the gleam of fun he had even as a young baby. And so the pictures we’ll take this afternoon of the newly-painted lounge wall and the lovely sunny colour in the solariage will not hold any hints of what’s next for us this winter (or the US summer that will happen in the midst of it). And when I look back on this day, I’ll know where it sprung from, and I’ll know where it leads to. And today it’ll just be a page-turner.

(Pictures today of the kids three years ago and two months ago.)