On Not Pretending
By Katie Blackburn
There are four posters hanging in the hallway of our home. Each one of them is a collection of a few dozen pictures from the year the memories were captured. The photos are displayed in perfectly aligned rows of chronological order; the symmetry of the memories a stark contrast to the reality of the chaos of our real lives, but I love that about these posters. There are new babies and first milestones and smiling faces and the natural decor of different seasons, all collected in one place for us to reminisce about together as we walk down this hallway to the front door, or back in to the kitchen, or toward the two bedrooms where two little boys lay their heads down at night. Our kids love these posters. They love talking about the time they sat on Santa’s lap and the day we were at the lake with all our friends. The baby, in particular, wants to stop every time I walk down the hallway with his body on my hip. With each poster finally at his eye level, he loves pointing to the people he knows and loves the most and saying their names. It’s as if these pictures make him feel safe just by reminding him who is in his life.
But it’s not only our kids who love these posters. Nearly every guest we have had to our house in the last five years has looked at them with excited interest and almost immediately followed up with, “These are so fun! Where did you get these printed?” And I smile with a little bit of pride because there is not one other aspect of my house or decorating or style anyone has ever asked me about. So I happily send on a link and for just a moment, I, the least trendy human alive, bask in my moment of trendiness.
I usually make these posters in January. I go through my camera roll and pick out the sweetest moments, the highlights, the good stuff. It’s a family time capsule of sorts, and since 2018, it has been my joy to curate our memories for us–but also to display them for everyone who walks down the hall. The first poster has just three kids in it, that is, until the very last row of pictures, when a teeny tiny baby girl shows up in the excited arms of my oldest, who, at six years old would pray and pray for God to make this baby her sister. (He would.)
The second poster is highlighted by another new baby who arrived a week late on a warm June day in 2019, and followed by photo after photo of an unexpected family of seven basking in the sunshine and smiling wide at how much God can surprise us.
When you move to the third poster, it’s a lot of us together in our home, our backyard, doing school lessons at the kitchen table as we all try to navigate the jarring nature of a national lockdown. My husband, a respiratory nurse—who isolated from us for the first few weeks of the pandemic, when no one knew much about anything except that people were coming into the hospital every day and couldn’t breathe—isn’t in many of these pictures. I should have known then to be aware of the trauma, to be thinking long-term, to not be naive. But like I said, no one knew much of anything then. I was focused on the five little children in front of me. We were all just focused on what was right in front of us.
You can tell from the pictures, my quarantine energy was strong those first six weeks, because there were balloons in the living room and bubbles in the backyard and craft paper on the fence as I was making the most of being together with not a whole lot to do. We made our own fun for a while, and I’m still proud of us for that. And when my husband came home a few weeks later for the rest of the year, while still being a frontline caregiver, we smiled on and kept living out a 2020 that was a strange and tense year for everyone.
The next photo poster, the fourth one, doesn’t start until 2022.
There are no memories on the wall in between.
***
It was December of 2021 when the light found everything that had been hidden in our family, in my marriage. Like any relational crumbling, there are layers and reasons, and there are also excuses and missteps and sin, and all of it crept into our lives like a toxic mold that hides in the walls of your house until you are too sick to deny its existence. And, like any relational crumbling, there was destruction.
Without any quick, easy, or straightforward path toward restoration, I can look around at my life now, I can at least say this: the dust has settled a bit. After a year of working hard to restore the brokenness in the man I love and the marriage we both want, there’s life to look forward to, to hope for, again.
One evening, I sat down on my couch with my phone and pulled up the camera roll to look for our highlights from the hard year. I don’t know what else to call it, so I’ve given that season the most simple moniker I can come up with. I thought, if I can just skip the photos from December, when everything fell apart, we could still put our poster up on the wall like we always have.
But I found out quickly that while there was a day, a month really, when the pain was the most visceral and the survival was the most challenging, the cracks were showing months and months before that. I can’t just skip over seeing those cracks in the photos, too. I tried. I scroll back to the day our miracle baby was born in February of 2021, and of course it was beautiful and my husband did not miss one second of his birth and yet, behind the masks we all had to wear in the hospital, I now know he was hiding how impossible it felt for him to keep showing up for his life.
I go back to the summertime, when we are at the lake and the baby is only five months old and smiling in his dad’s arms. But I don’t just see that. I see the day the relapse began in secret.
On the screen of my phone, I looked at our memories from the fall, the first day of school, the apple picking, the pumpkins, even the Christmas tree we had just managed to cut down and decorate a day before … everything. But I can’t see the smiles and anticipation for a new school or the plans for applesauce in the Crockpot or the “remember this one” conversations about the ornaments on the tree. What I see instead is everything happening behind the pictures: the medicine isn’t working well, he is thinking in one of them. I’m beyond exhausted, he is saying in another. I need to call in sick today, he is pleading in a third.
I didn’t see it all, that is, until I knew it all.
But it’s all there—the depression, the trauma, the addiction—hidden behind the pictures.
And I can’t put these pictures on our wall.
***
By the following January–a year later and a new collection of memories behind us—my daughter, ever the holder of traditions in our home, is asking me about the missing posters. We are two years behind our memory-keeping, she reminds me. And I know, I see the hallway, too. But she doesn’t know everything I see behind the pictures I don’t want to put up, and so I deflect and promise I will catch up and finish the 2022 pictures.
As I am telling a friend about the poster that isn’t there, she listens and affirms that it is okay to feel reluctance, that she understands what I see in those pictures is hard. And then she tells me a story about her own parents.
In her home, every year her dad bought her mom a Christmas ornament—a really nice one, marking another year together in a meaningful way. But one year, her parents' finances were in a bad place, and her dad did not have enough money to buy the ornament. When things slowly got better, he wanted to make it up to her. He offered to purchase her two lavish ornaments the next year, as if to overlook the difficulty of the season before.
No, it’s ok, her mom would say, reminding him that she doesn’t need to pretend that year was anything other than what it was—challenging. She was happy they have enough resources for ornaments again, but she is not ashamed they didn’t have enough before. There was a little hole in the ornament collection, a gap in doing what they had always done, and that was just how her mom wanted it. Her peace was in accepting what was, and being grateful for what is.
I listen to my friend’s story, and I exhale, almost in relief.
***
There are four posters hanging in the hallway of our home, each one a collection of a few dozen pictures from the year the memories were captured.
Except for the hard year. Because I choose not to see on our wall everyday what I couldn’t see then. I’m not ashamed of what we went through—I am, in fact, incredibly proud and abundantly grateful for what God brought us out of. But I’m not going to pretend that year was anything other than what it was, either.
And the more I have thought about it—about the strength it has taken me to say that I don’t want to remember those moments in the pictures as a facade—I think, at least for me, that honest admission is the start of healing. I think it means we aren’t there anymore, where the pictures captured us, and that’s a grace.
The poster after that year, the 2022 collection I finally finished, is a good one. Not perfect, but good. At the very least, it’s not a lie. And when I look at it I think, my gosh, what an absolute miracle being made new truly is.
Katie Blackburn lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband Alex and their six little ones, one of whom came to them through foster care. She is saved by grace and runs on cold brew coffee and quiet mornings at her desk. You can read more of her writing on faith, motherhood, special needs, and a good, good God at katiemblackburn.com or via her own Substack, Let Me Tell You. You can read Katie’s Coffee + Crumbs essays here, and purchase her book, Gluing the Cracks, here.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.