hey boo,

listen, i can’t take it anymore.
i cannot cannot cannot read one more article where you beg your partner to take more photos of you with your children. the thought of you longing for something that you can give yourself and your babies shatters and breaks me in the worst way. as i gather photos of my pregnancy and my first year as a mother for this series, it makes me cringe to think about you not having photos like this of yourself and your kids because you waited and waited and waited for someone else to take them. if i’m being completely honest, all of my guts tell me that the root of this desire is the result of us just wanting to feel seen as the patient, nurturing, loving mothers that we are. that all the invisible to the outside work that we do, isn’t entirely invisible at all. that maybe the thankless part of what we do every second of our day can be countered by a small token of recognition. that maybe even the actual photographs themselves are just this beautiful bonus of feeling like someone recognized the weight of our presence in the world, and not just any world, the world of our children during a time that they aren’t capable of keeping memories for themselves.

or is that just me?

you see, i get it. i get that it really sucks when you recognize that you’re slap dab in the middle of this moment that feels so damn good, and you just wish someone on the outside would see it, and feel the weight of it’s importance so much so that they instinctually snap the damn photo. this is the same anguish that i felt everyday for longer than i care to admit. then one day i grew tired enough of feeling upset at my husband for not seeing me to figure out a plan b to get what i wanted. i could be in as many photos of my child’s childhood as i damn well pleased! i realized that my husband, friends and family were not responsible for the memories that i give to my children, i am. and it wasn’t that my husband wasn’t seeing me, it was simply that our frame of mind on this particular topic was very different. the lack of photos only meant that he didn’t associate the recognition of a moment with the action of picking up a camera to document it. i can’t fault the man for it, and most certainly can’t change him, right? so one day while vacuuming + having having these pounding + achey thoughts, the conversation in my head went from something about feeling a tad bit narcissistic for wanting photos of me to exist, to something like

you owe no one an explanation for why you give your children memories of who you are.

followed by some cuss words about once again worrying about things i shouldn’t be worrying about, because that’s the story of my damn life.
maybe it’s just the time that we’re living in? maybe it’s the fact that we so readily and instantly share these memories with one another that causes us to wonder if we’re doing it right, or too much? listen, i’m probably going to do one today because while i was brushing my teeth this morning i realized that my hair was that really good kind of messy and i felt really pretty, and when i print that photo that’s probably the tiny note i’ll write on the back of it too. maybe when she’s looking at it someday long after i’m gone she’ll laugh at how me that note sounds. (note: i did wind up doing a self portrait the day that i started writing this, and as a matter of fact it was immediately after writing that sentence that i ran out of my office, grabbed jo, stripped us down, set up the camera, and got this portrait of her and i.

but britt, you’re a photographer with a fancy camera and skills and the rest of us regular folk can’t document our lives that way!!

bullshit you can’t, and i’m going to tell you how! this portrait was taken with my iPhone, and involved a hungry un-napped baby, so save your drama for your mama and your excuses on this because there is no reason that you can’t have this too.

tomorrow i am going to give you a step-by-step guide that will get you started not only from a technical point of view, but also an artistic point of view to take your photos beyond just crappy cell phone snapshots. your very first step is to spend the evening thinking about the photographs that you imagine your children looking at of you, and them growing up and old together. what do those moments look like in your head? what are the feelings you want your children to feel when they look at them? that is the very core of this adventure that i’m encouraging you all to embark on with me. the instructions tomorrow will feel easier to wrap your mind around if you have some ideas swirling around before you start reading. write those visions down, along with questions you have that i might be able to answer for you. i am deathly afraid to do a live Q&A as the third part of this series, but i think that might be the best way to accomplish helping you feel equipped to take this on…we’ll see. i’m making no promises, because stage fright is fucking real guys.

if you know someone who could benefit from this, please share it. i feel like so many of those articles have broken into the internet airwaves recently, and there needs to be answer back that doesn’t involve the thought that our partners will magically change and do this thing for us. and what about the single parents who don’t have the luxury of hoping a partner will see the light?? maybe we can even consider this another superpower we add to our resume of bad assery!

i seriously can’t wait to hear + see + feel what y’all come up with and where this goes,

xo