Photographs
By Lorren Lemmons
@lorrenlemmons
I pace the playground, phone to my ear as my daughter peeks between plastic windows, waving at me. My health coach asks me why I’m worried about my upcoming trip.
“I’m worried about my kids and my husband being stressed out while I’m gone,” I say, stalling.
She sees right through me. “Is that really what you’re concerned about?”
No. I’m really worried about the headshots.
I work for a start-up magazine. For our first three issues, we’ve taken selfies in portrait mode, and then our graphic designer has toyed with them until the lighting looks cohesive enough to go on the same page. But for our retreat, we will have real headshots taken by a real photographer. Something that I should be thrilled about. For over a year, when a publication asks me for a headshot, I send a selfie or a family photo with everyone else cropped out. Now I’m getting a real one, taken by a top-notch photographer.
But everyone else on my team is beautiful and put together and thin. My BMI brands me as a medical liability, and despite the hundreds of dollars I pay this coach and the adjustments I’m making and the miles I’m running and the weights I’m lifting, I still don’t look good. I don’t want anybody taking my picture.
“Are you going to let your worry about these pictures ruin your whole trip?” my coach asks. “Aren’t there several more things you’re looking forward to?”
Yes. I’m looking forward to flying in an airplane by myself with an e-reader full of books and a phone full of podcasts. I’m looking forward to sleeping in a hotel room with no children to wake me up. I’m looking forward to seeing my mom, who is driving three hours to meet up with me since I’ll be on the correct side of the country for once. I’m looking forward to meeting the women I’ve been working with online for over a year.
I’m dreading the photos and being the heaviest one in the room. I’m worried that I won’t be taken seriously because I’m fat, and I’m worried I will have to face the added flesh I can usually avoid by not using full-length mirrors and only looking at myself from a certain angle. I’m worried these women I admire and look up to will be disappointed in me somehow.
***
My middle child leafs through my wedding scrapbook, carefully examining each page. “Who is that?” he asks, pointing at a picture of me gazing down at my bouquet.
“Honey, that’s me,” I say, baffled.
“Why do you look so different? Why are you so skinny?” he asks, blue eyes innocent.
I know he doesn’t mean anything by it, that “fat” and “thin” hold less baggage for a child than they do for an adult woman whose weight has been scrutinized for as long as she can remember.
It still bothers me, though.
“My body was different then,” I tell him. “I hadn’t had any babies yet, and having babies can change your body.”
He pats my belly. “I don’t like looking at fat people,” he says, and wanders off to his LEGOs.
***
My mother-in-law died when my husband was fourteen years old. I never had the chance to meet her, and sometimes I feel like I’m chasing her ghost. She sounds like a kindred spirit to me—we both spoke French and traveled to France. My husband tells me she was fascinated with the human brain, and I majored in neuroscience. I feel a loose connection with her and a hope that she approves of the way I’m taking care of her baby boy—the one born ten years after the other three, after losses and what I imagine was a giving up of ever having that fourth child.
We don’t have many photos of her. The one I see the most is from their last set of family pictures. Her smile is radiant—it’s the image I mentally carry of her. She’d lost a lot of weight from the cancer by then, and she looks different from the other photos I’ve seen.
I haven’t seen much video of her either. There’s one from one my sister-in-law’s wedding. She chatters away in a line, and then she says, “Oh, they’re taking a picture. I’ve gotta suck in!” My husband laughed at that part—his mom was known for being spunky and saying what she thought. But I wonder if part of the reason we don’t have pictures is because she felt self-conscious the way I do.
My father-in-law is selling the house he’s lived in for decades. He’s accumulated more than he can take with him, and my husband flies out to help him sort the house. Boxes in the garage that haven’t seen light since before the millennium are brought out and gone through. My husband returns home with artifacts from his childhood that will probably accumulate the same dust in our spare room closet. But the box also holds a treasure trove of photographs of my mother-in-law—not the posed portrait hanging next to my husband’s desk, but drugstore envelopes with candids and strips of film negative. My mother-in-law hugging my husband in a Boy Scout uniform, smiling with her best friend, holding her oldest grandchildren. I gratefully add a few images to the sparse archive in my mind.
***
I have a blast on “Mommy’s first business trip.” My coworkers and I bond and laugh in the enormous passenger van we’ve rented to ferry us around. We sit in the workspace at our office and bounce ideas off each other in real time instead of over Zoom. My boss has stocked a cupboard with our favorite snacks, and we pass popcorn around the table as we plan our next project.
But my awkwardness returns when our photographer shows up. I watch woman after woman stand in front of the backdrop and pose, flipping their hair, flashing smiles. I stand stiffly, feeling like a hippopotamus in my shapeless dress that still outlines the bulk of my belly. “I don’t know how to stand,” I wail, and the photographer tries to give me some tips, but when the pictures come back, all I can see is the slackness of my jawline and the size of my arms.
***
I sit in my oldest son’s piano lesson, and the two younger ones are making noise. My son’s teacher, a childless man with only a small foyer to sit in, glances over at us while my son tries to focus on the music. I’ve brought Where’s Waldo books and coloring pages but my kids aren’t interested, instead scuffling on the carpet as I try to get them to dial down the volume.
Giving up, I hand my toddler my phone, hoping she doesn’t accidentally delete something. She starts scrolling through the picture thumbnails—they learn how to use technology so quickly—and I notice her pausing and clicking on different pictures before exiting out to scroll again.
I’ve made an effort to take more selfies with my daughter than I did with the boys, tired of being a hidden mother in the background, always present but never visible. So my makeup-free, double-chinned face is preserved in my camera roll.
In the seconds before my four-year-old demands his own turn holding the phone, I notice what she’s clicking on. Every single time she sees a picture of my face, she clicks on it and looks at me close up. It’s me she wants to see.
***
I’m not comfortable in my own skin, despite the affirmations I’ve read and the body-positive women I follow on Instagram. I struggle not to talk about my weight in front of my children, and I cringe when a photograph exposes an unsightly part of me that I usually manage to ignore. I’d rather forget these parts of me. I’d rather live in my body without seeing it.
Someday my children will comb through the digital equivalent of cardboard boxes, and I doubt they will look at me and think, “Wow, it was a shame Great-Grandma wasn’t a size 2.” I hope—I believe—they will instead look at me and feel a connection. Maybe they’ll recognize their freckles or nose or hands. Maybe they’ll glimpse me at the piano and smile to see their own interests mirrored a few branches back on the family tree. Maybe they’ll simply be grateful to have a piece of me, a woman they’ve heard about but never met, whose blood runs through their veins.
So while I’m still practicing love for the form captured in pixels or film, I will let those moments of my own life be frozen for the future. I’ll remember my kids won’t compare before and after photos. Instead, they’ll search for connections.
Guest essay written by Exhale member Lorren Lemmons. Lorren lives in Georgia with her Army dentist husband and three children. She is a pediatric oncology nurse turned freelance writer and neighborhood piano teacher who plays with words in the early hours of the morning. When she’s not parenting, writing, or teaching, she loves kayaking, hiking, traveling, and making music.
Photo by Lottie Caiella.