I Was Here Today

The camera has been found.

But my beloved black Kodak came back wounded.

After work tonight, Hubs helped me continue tearing the house apart looking for the camera.  And after an exhaustive search, he found it … in the bottom of our closet … in his guitar case.

Naturally.

It was pretty clear that some little body had snuck it back there and played with it for awhile.  When Hubs pulled it out, the new long-life batteries were almost dead, the lense had been messed with and all of the settings had been tweaked.  But the worst part was that all 118 images on there were gone.  About half of the pictures I can live without, but I spent hours on a tutorial and have lost all of it.

Given the recovery location,  I’m sure it was Creepy who walked off with the camera and did all the damage.  And though I’m so bummed right now at all I’ve lost, I’m surprised by how not mad I am.

Today has been one of those really weird, totally normal and yet completely abnormal sorts of days that I have no idea how to explain.  But it’s been one of those days that brings out new  perspectives when I sit at this computer and try and make sense of it all.

And it seems a little odd that a recovered camera could help me gel the mass of random ideas floating around in my head right now, but I find myself wiping sticky finger prints off my camera and reminding myself of seemingly unrelated sentiments like Stuff Doesn’t Matter and Life is Precious and So Very Fragile.

I’ve been in a funk over the camera thing and surprised by how much this small love turned huge passion means to me.  I have missed recording some pretty cool things in our family’s life this week and it bothers me.  I’m seeing how this medium of blogging and photography is helping me finally keep something of a record of this one wild, crazy and precious life I get.  Loosing my camera has felt a little bit like loosing a part of my history—in a very small way, sure—but a piece nonetheless.

I’ve been so inspired by the photography of my cousin’s wife and especially love the pictures of her kids.  Not only does she capture their souls, but the way in which she does that with her camera also captures her love for them as a mother.   Her barely one year old son, Ethan, is in critical condition at their local children’s hospital with what they think is spinal meningitis.  It’s terrifying and emotionally draining  and yet through it all, she and her husband have captured this experience in pictures.  Seeing pictures of this tiny baby in his ICU bed or looking at a picture of the ambulance that transferred him to another hospital have been heart wrenching.

But I think I understand why she feels compelled to record these moments amidst tears.

We are the YouTube Generation, the Reality TV Generation, the Facebook and Twitter Generation; a generation that is used to 24 hour news and live on the scene coverage that records life as it happens.  And taking pictures is what we do--how we record what happens around and to us.  I bet most of us have hundreds of pictures of our family’s life and history, but little journaling or written stories.  Blogs and scrapbooks have become a new way to start recording and capturing our lives so that our children and grandchildren will have a record of what we went through. 

But part of new form of recording seems to gloss over the painful and uncomfortable.  A year ago I would never have taken pictures of myself stressing over bills or broken down on the side of the road.   But today I probably would so that I could look back and remember how precious life is … how difficult moments have an amazing ability to immediately reorder priorities and clear away the crap in our lives … to remember how much we love our kids despite the messes and whining and drama and work, and how shattered we’d be if it was ever gone.

I reread a post this morning that I’d wrote a while back on one of my lowest days as a mom.  I was trying to put into words why I felt driven to record a moment that was hard to look back on, “… to acknowledge that ‘I was here today,’ even if today sucked…” and I think that’s exactly it. 

In every experience, good or bad,  I need to record that I was here today, even if today sucked.

I think it’s why I cried and snapped pictures and cried and snapped pictures when Ash and then Sean wound up in the hospital.  I think it’s why I drug my camera along for the ride last Thursday when I fought back tears as I was bombarded by broken water lines and standing water and kid barf and vermin and three back-to-back tantrums by three different kids in three different stores … all before lunch time.

I was here today, even if today sucked.

And I can’t help but look back at history and wonder how different it would be if those accounts were recorded scrapbook or blog style:

What if all we had from Washington crossing the Delaware was a smiling group shot of the troops in Trenton?  What if no one recorded how bad the storm that night was, or how trapped the American troops were, or about the men who froze to death on the march there because no one wanted to remember just how bad it was?

Or what if the only record we had of the Martin and Willy handcart companies was a picture of the group heading out and then arriving in the valley? What if no one recorded just how bad the storm was that pressed in on them, or how devastating their losses in the Cove were, or the impassioned words of Brigham Young to go rescue those stranded on the plains, or fate of those brave men who gave their lives crossing the icy river to bring those pioneers home?

How different would our lives be, even generations later, if we didn’t know what they went through?

Those moments that are the hardest to record, the ones we want to look back on the least, are the ones that mold us, shape us, steel us and sanctify us.  They are our Delawares and Martin’s Coves … those places were we are tried, tested, broken and delivered … the places were we find our faith and our God and our strength to keep going.

I was here today …

I’m feeling more and more that the greatest favor I can do my DHD is to be honest and complete as I record this time we have together.  Otherwise I worry that this one record I’ll leave them-- this blog thing--will be just a hollow highlight reel and collection of sarcastic ramblings from their crazy mother.

So I guess all of this is just a really long was to say that I’m happy to have my camera back, not because it’s just some thing that I love, but because it allows me to record the good and bad things that make my life worth loving and living: the smiles at birthdays,  the tears from tantrums, the pictures of random grocery store stuff when I run away for a midnight mommy sanity break and even the pictures of my son’s torn apart hand after I screwed up.  And maybe that’s why when I think back on those pictures, and the pictures of little Ethan in the ICU, that I’m not really angry about Creepy messing with my camera after all. 

Stuff Doesn’t Matter.  Life is Precious and Short.  Sticky finger prints on cameras will mostly come off.

 I was here today.