Freeze frame

My sons hate posing for photos. They loathe it. It’s been a long time in coming, this distaste, but it’s full blown now, and I can sense it every time I pull out my camera. There’s the slinking away from the scene as I locate my subject, the obvious shrug when called to take part, the defensive goofy face as I focus— a final, last gasp at maintaining some semblance of whatever it is that makes them so despise being part of my happy little snapshots.

Despite the sighs, they do it. They stand up, they smile, they lift a younger sibling. They jest and they poke, but in the end, they do exactly as I say, and they laugh along at the process as if the initial protest was just a show they had to put on in order to save face. They let me steal just a second or two of their life— something precious to them, yes. And yet, it’s like they understand somehow that it’s more precious to me.

I haven’t raised robots. The idea of those compliant, obedient children who somehow always walk lockstep with their parents’ wishes is foreign around here. This is a family of unique individuals— 11 of them!— each more than happy to list his or her preferences at any given time.

And yet my boys let me take photos of them even though they’d frankly, rather eat bees.

It’s a small thing, you’re thinking. So small. A minute of a person’s day, not a big thing to ask. I’d say you’re right. Standing for a photo someone wants to take is not philanthropy. It’s not an overarching kindness that saves lives or enriches the world.

But it means so much to me, as a mother. It means that I have stored up not just those freeze-frame images that my heart captures all the time, but real ones I can look back on as well. It means I can stumble on proof of that one day we were playing out back and the boys brought the frisbee out and I caught them, just that once, cavorting like preschoolers with one another again. It means I can track Jack outpacing Mathaus in height, or the sweetness, forever, of Mathaus swinging Birdie into his arms while Jack cuddles Jude. It means that in ten years’ time I can scroll back to that day in 2016 when we went to the Knoxville Zoo and found the lion statue, a near-copy of the ones in Seattle’s zoo, and grouped the kids around it in a silly attempt to meld our past with our then-present.

It means all of this and more.

And while I don’t think they fully grasp it, somehow, they know. Somehow they know that this mother needs to grab time and hold onto it just a little tighter in certain moments. Somehow they know that this brief window they give me is like a gold coin I will slip into my treasure chest and revisit, again and again, long after they have forgotten that it ever transpired.

I am grateful. So grateful. These boys of mine— these young men— bless me, daily, with the people they are becoming, and the character and heart they show. The pictures… they’re a small thing. But they are also huge, as kindness and love always are.