Putting Myself In The Picture

Last month when I was on vacation I posted lots of pictures from previous beach trips. A very nice person left a comment asking why I wasn't in any of the photos.  Sigh.  I've been down this road before, and I thought I had been rehabbed, but you caught me.

I'm the "official" photographer in my family.  I live in a house of men - if I don't do it, the only evidence we will have of our adventures will be a few camera phone pictures of some random thing the boys find funny.

About ten years ago I started scrapbooking.  As my then nine year old son was looking through his baby book he asked, "Mama, where are the pictures of you?"  Later that night I flipped through and realized he was right - in the fifty page story that chronicled his first three years of life, there were exactly seven pictures with me in them. Oops. That's not good.

Ironically, I used to scold my Grandma Mary for the exact same thing.  She refused to be photographed because she wasn't happy with her weight.  "Someday when I'm thinner I'll let you take my picture", she would say.  Even in my family wedding photos - no Grandma Mary.  She died eight years ago, and I don't have much to remember her by.  Not even one picture of the two of us together.

I don't refuse to be photographed - but I definitely hide behind the camera.  I never like how I appear in pictures, so I just snap away, and hope nobody will notice.  But I really don't want to end up like Grandma Mary.

Nine years ago, when my son pointed out that there wasn't much of me in his baby book, I vowed to change that.  I made sure to ask other people to take a picture with me in it.  And for awhile I did pretty good.

But old habits die hard, and after the comment on my blog, I looked through some photos from the past few years. There aren't very many Lana's in them.  Or they look like this gem, taken by my younger son. I mean really - is this how I want to be remembered by my grandchildren someday?

I need to get over myself.  My family loves me, they like how I look, and they want to have pictures of me when I'm gone.  When I look at the photo at the top of this post, my gut reaction is to start criticizing.  I showed it to my older son, and he said, "That was such a fun day.  Your hat looks cute."  And there you have it.

This time I'm putting it in writing.  If you start seeing a bunch of pictures without me in them, remind me.  And don't be nice about it - I can take it!  And to that commenter who asked why I wasn't in the photos, I say thank you.  You reminded me - again - to put myself in the picture.