Everything Happened | vol. 230
Fall Family Photos for the Deluded and Vain (Me)
Saturday 10/21, 1:30 p.m.
We have family photos in an hour. My hair is unwashed going on four days. I am in my underwear still because I haven’t decided yet if I am going to attempt to use compression exercise shorts as shapewear underneath my papery thin jeans. I am taking a paintbrush and white acrylic paint to the favorite shoes of my emotionally volatile four-year-old, and indeed the only shoes that currently fit her. It would be easy to ruin them by doing this, and I don’t have a back-up plan. It occurs to me that we didn’t feed the kids lunch. And my house looks like this:
This unforced entanglement with professional photographers is fairly recent for middle class people. When I was a kid, my family sat for the Olan Mills flashbulb every few years in the church basement with its stink of scorched Folger’s. This was for the purpose of updating our entry in the church directory. And then sometimes an officious relative, someone known to have a “nice camera,” would cluster each family unit for portraits at a rambunctious extended family Christmas gathering. “I’ll print doubles!” Comme ça:
And that was family photos.
Then digital photography happened and access to instant visual language via our phones happened and now I’ll die if I don’t pay someone mid three figs to meet me in public and take 500 photos of my family at least once a year?? Maybe you don’t also have this sickness, and like, good for you, quarantine me and the others like we’re in a moody contagion-themed RPG, build a better society far from our pulsing, retching corpses, still heard through tortured gasps saying to phantom children: “guys….please….this was….important….to me…guys….guys??!!! please?!!”
Is it some sort of humiliation kink that compels me to do this? Did issuing forth the next generation force me to confront the agony of my mortality, leaving me scrambling to find permanence among digital treasures I can admire but never hold? Why do I crave a dragon’s hoard of well-lit photos of my children? Why will all the photos in the world never be enough? Why did I just command the world’s data centers to boil the seas until they contain one flattering photo of me in nascent middle age?
Where it began: My first kid was born in 2015 but my new reality of life was curb-stomping me pretty good that fall and so I didn’t want to bring a stranger with a $1200 lens into things yet. The next year, in 2016, I got it together to hire my friend Lisa to document both my cute toddler and the worst edges on a white woman since that woman who told her boyfriend to kill himself via text.
Then Trump was elected and I think we maybe didn’t even send out Christmas cards that year because I thought about my conservative midwestern extended family who were, in my mind, obliquely if not directly responsible for this, and I decided they did not DESERVE my child’s cute face in their mail slot because they had been BAD. They had been WORSE than my edges which remain HORRENDOUS to this day.
2017: Nick was on the job market, I had willed myself into a software engineering job, something I almost immediately regretted doing. Desi was 2 and at lifetime peak cuteness. I found a photographer based out of Athens, Ohio, where I’d gone to grad school, who shot a stunning wedding inside a bowl-shaped limestone cave in the Hocking Hills that I was obsessed with.
Desi had a rank diaper the entire session but would not let us wrestle him down for a diaper change so everyone pretended not to smell it. I call these our Subaru ad photos and they would have been a great option to use if Nick murdered all of us and you needed to prove that we had appeared to neighbors to be a nice normal family!!!
The month after these photos were taken, Nick accepted the offer for his current academic job, ushering in a thaw in our marital Cold War re: having another baby.
2018: We moved to the Eastern Shore and Nick took a .5 guard to his head, ending a decades-long will-they won’t-they Sam-and-Diane storyline re: when he was going to finally go for the official Bald Guy Shave. Doesn’t it look great?
I wore bright red lipstick so no one would know that I had a body. Misdirection.here were some photos of my ass from this shoot that still flash into my head unbidden like dick pics being Zoom-bombed into an April 2020 shareholder meeting. It was 40 degrees in October and the wind was like razors. Desi kept doing a bit where he acted like he was going to dive into the river.
The photographer was so bad with kids I assumed she had never seen one before, and possibly had never been a child herself. When she casually revealed at the end of the session that she had three children, I stopped dead in my tracks and my eyes bugged out Rodney Dangerfield-style against my will. She laughed and said, “I know, I look really young..”
Then I got in the car and realized I hadn’t taken out my Invisalign, which were brown due to me constantly drinking coffee while wearing my Invisalign.
2019: We extremely could not afford family photos this year and my friend Katie took pity on us and shot some anyway. This shoot generated no anecdotes because it was not stressful in the least, probably because I wasn’t hearing the sound of my money being sucked away as though through an airplane toilet with every moment that my kids pulled kid horseshit.
Look at Jane’s big moon face. There was not one hair on her head under that rugby helmet looking thing.
2020: We also could not afford family photos this year, and the “deal” I thought I was getting when I booked this photographer turned out to only represent a “session fee” and not “the actual fucking digital images.” I ended up spending $600 in ransom to get the pictures, which went on a credit card, allowing JP Morgan Chase to continue extorting me for finance charges which is kind of their whole sicko deal.
You may recognize Nick’s shirt from season 1! Photos of my ass from this shoot were slightly redemptive of 2018’s atrocities, though not pictured here because I don’t have a Substack tier for that kind of content (yet.) Things were looking up! Vaccines were on the horizon! Soon all our kids would be out of diapers! We were going to make it probably!
2021: Lol no, we had another baby.
Guys, why did I hire someone to come to our house to take family photos five days after giving birth? Here is another in a series of examples of how I am “smart” but also “an idiot.” My nesting math was that this would be a family photos + newborn photos twofer and I didn’t want Polly to lose her scrunchled newborn look. They change so fast!
I got Desi and Nick both in for a haircut the day before this shoot, because when you are trapped under a baby all day you can make a lot of online booking portal submissions and cause a lot of trouble!! This felt extremely competent of me, until Desi didn’t like his haircut and refused to come out of his room when the photographer arrived. The jeans I bought online to wear (2 sizes up from my pre-baby size) obviously didn’t fit. Zipping up this jumpsuit to wear instead felt Victorian in that I needed Nick to help me do it, like a lady’s maid, and that I wouldn’t have said no to some opium.
2022: Polly is wearing diapers in this photo but not me so that’s a year over year improvement. At this point, I fully relinquished creative control when Jane rejected the turtleneck I’d bought her (4T daisy print, lettuce-edge ribbed mock turtle, never worn) because she could “feel her neck” which, you know what, yes.
2023: Jane accepted my work on her shoes, which included painting over the dried white acrylic with some pinkish nailpolish (Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in “Camel-ot” which I had to add acetone to because it was so chunky.) We stopped for gas on the way there and I asked Nick to run in and get the kids “something quick to eat, nothing messy” since we forgot to feed them, thinking he would read my mind and get them some granola bars or like, string cheese. He emerged from the gas station with a carton of glistening potato wedges for each child which he began handing back to them in their carseats like that was okay. (“What? I didn’t get dipping sauces!”)
The kids were so bad at the photo session that it actually hurt my feelings and made me furious at them, when usually their horseshit just makes me hate myself for having expectations or indeed dreams for my life. Eventually I told our sainted photographer, fuck it, just get me and Nick. Family photo representation is a privilege and not a right.
yr mate,
Evie
P.S.
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My favorite time of year, when I get to yell the words "YOU KNOW I DON'T ASK YOU GUYS FOR MUCH"
My wife decided early in our parenting journey that family photos were her hill to die on and this whole essay made me CACKLE. The Subaru line? Hahhahahahahahahah