The truth behind the ‘back to school’ picture…

The truth behind the ‘back to school’ instagram post…

I wanted a funny, cute back to school/business picture. So naturally I grabbed the box of ‘old photos’ , you know the box - every family has one. The box of hundreds of printed pictures (before digital was a thing), back when we used to print off every photo from a roll of film, but the photos never actually got sorted, they sit in a box. Or at least my family do.

Our box, to me, is treasure. it always has been. It’s also a box of grief.

So, there’s a photo I want to use for my back to school/back to business instagram post - I know the one I want, me in the garden, holding my My Little Pony lunchbox, looking oh so early 90’s.

I open the box and it takes me a while, but I find it.

And of course, somewhere between the first photo and this one, I’m crying.

Because, every fucking photo counts. The ‘good’ ones, the ‘bad ones’, all of them. We all get so bogged down in the perfect photo, the instagram photo. What to post, how we look. (I hold both my hands up).

The photo I’m looking at and crying over now… is the ordinary one. The one that’s SO mundane, it’s hard to know why my Dad even took the photo in the first place. We’re not even looking at the camera or the main focus of the photo.

But it totally caught me off guard, it’s the quiet ease of sitting naked on your mums lap at age 3, while she rests her feet in a paddling pool. The photo is so unremarkable, so humdrum, but for me it’s proof of a life that once existed, an experience that was so normal to me then. But now it’s a stranger. 

My mum died when I was 4, I hate saying that, it feels so… bare. But I can’t say I lost her, I didn’t lose her, I wasn’t careless with her.

It’s easy to delete photos nowadays, this one would definitely have been deleted if it could have been, but it’s the beauty in the everyday that we can’t quite grasp until, it’s too late.

I’ve spent my life wanting to be extraordinary, to live a life for the one she lost (ugh, there’s that word again). It wasn’t until I was in a therapy session recently when I proclaimed the realistion that actually all I want, all I have ever wanted… is just an ordinary life. One where I know how it feels to have sat on my mums lap.

A life so ordinary, that has become the extraordinary to me.

I leave you with my motto as always… take the photos, print the photos, stick ‘em sodding everywhere.