Look at this photograph. Lindsey with Charlie at four and a half months. I took this picture and I remember thinking: I need to capture this. Not for Instagram, not for the baby book, not for some future slideshow at his wedding. I needed it for him. For later. For when he’s fifteen or twenty-five or forty and he looks at his mother and sees only “mom”… the person who nags him about homework or worries too much or doesn’t understand whatever bullshit he thinks is important at the time.
Sometimes,” I ventured, “it doesn’t occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn’t stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there’s nobody like her…
My Ántonia
Willa Cather got it right. Boys don’t naturally understand that their mothers were ever young and pretty. That they had lives before the kid showed up and made everything about him. That they were loved, desired, complicated human beings with their own stories and fears and dreams that had nothing to do with being someone’s mother.
I look at Lindsey in this photograph, young, beautiful, completely absorbed in our son, and I think: he needs to know this. Someday, when he’s being an asshole teenager or a self-absorbed twenty-something, he needs to remember that his mother was this person. Is this person. That I was very much in love with her once. Still am. That there’s nobody like her.
You might know this, but nobody bothered to tell me, but being a parent, it’s the most relentlessly unglamorous thing I’ll ever do. It’s exhaustion and repetition and the slow erosion of the person I used to be. It’s watching someone you love disappear into an endless cycle of feeding and changing and soothing and trying to remember who they were before this small tyrant took over their/your entire existence.
And yet. Look at her. Four and a half months in and she’s already better at this than I’ll ever be. She’s found some reservoir of patience and grace that I don’t possess. She makes it look so easy even though I know, I see, how hard it is. How tired she is. How much she’s given up.
The beauty in this photograph isn’t just her face or the way the light hits or whatever technical aspects make it work as an image. It’s the moment itself. It’s her complete presence with him. The way Charlie’s the only thing in the world that matters, which in that moment, he is.
I don’t deserve this. I’ve never deserved this. The universe doesn’t usually work this way, giving broken, cynical bastards second chances at being decent human beings. But somehow, inexplicably, she saw something in me worth keeping. Worth building a life with. Worth making a child with.
Charlie’s going to grow up. He’s going to take her for granted the way all kids take their mothers for granted. He’s going to be inconsiderate and self-centered and forget that she has needs and wants beyond making sure he’s fed and safe and happy. That’s what kids do.
But I can leave him this photograph. And when he’s old enough to understand it, I’m going to tell him: Your mother was young and pretty. She still is. I was very much in love with her once. I still am. There’s nobody like her.
She remade herself into someone who could love you unconditionally while still maintaining some fragment of who she was before. She did this without complaint, without keeping score, without demanding the recognition she deserves.
So be kind to her. Be grateful. Remember that she was a whole person before you existed, and she’s still that person now, even though you can’t always see it through the lens of your own needs.
Look at this photograph, Charlie. This is your mother at four and a half months into the hardest job she’ll ever have. This is what love looks like when it’s real. This is what I almost missed. What I could have fucked up through fear or selfishness or sheer stupidity.
This is how lucky we both are.