As I shuffled through seventeen years of memories captured on film, her doe eyes followed me from photograph to photograph. So did her smile–gap-toothed, then crooked, braced, and at last, perfectly straight. I discovered her all over again–at two years old, at ten, at sixteen. A highlight reel of both the extraordinary and the everyday scrolled across my computer screen. Her life unfolded over four continents of landmarks, oceans, and mountains in far flung places.
I watched, mesmerized, as she opened her arms to the waiting world.
As seventeen years scrolled by me in a blink, I re-discovered my daughter, but to my surprise, I also re-discovered myself. Years of photographs found me either front and center with an arm slung around her shoulder or hovering close in the background–a flash of tanned leg, a turned back, extended arms carrying flaming candles on chocolate cake. Other times, I stood behind the camera, narrating the story of my daughter’s life as it blossomed in slow motion right before my eyes.
Bloom. Click. Blink.
I’ve carried a secret fear for years–the fear that the complexity of my inner life eclipses the day to day living of my outer life. I spend too much time in my head, in a book, in emotions and words stored up for no one but me. I often wonder if I become so wrapped up in my own inner stories, that I forget to live the one unfolding in front of me.
I worry that I missed it all, that the doe eyes and ready smile and open arms are a product of my imagination, rather than permanent tattoos inked onto the skin of my day to day.
The photos reminded me of the truth; I co-wrote the narrative of her life. I didn’t miss a thing. Every first, every last, every familiar gesture, every friend, every party, every rolled eye, and crooked grin. I flutter in and around all of them, sometimes front and center, sometimes just outside the frame, sometimes behind the lens as a witness to her story unfolding.
I couldn’t erase the smile from my face as I read her story in photographs. This second reading of her life confirmed my fears are unfounded. I was present, and I remember each of those moments with clarity.
I remember now too, how those photos only tell part of the story. They don’t tell of the private moments when I sang her to sleep or read her books at bedtime. They show nothing of the prayers whispered, the hopes met or deferred, the dreams dreamed, the tears cried, or the sleepless nights that make a surprise return when teenagers begin dating and driving.
The photos tell a story, but the heartbeat behind all that living? It’s pure poetry.
