His face looked strained. Eyes squinting. Mouth tightened into a painful smile. His expression was transparent to anyone. My son would rather be anywhere else - perhaps even a fancy restaurant wearing an itchy suit - than at the edge of the ocean with me.
“Are you sure you don’t want to wear your glasses?”
He had jammed his hands in the pockets of sage green shorts and hooked his specs onto the collar of his white t-shirt before his sister, who had been acting as my assistant, silently held out an outstretched hand to retrieve them.
“Ok, gramps. Hand ‘em over. I’ll hang onto them until this whole ordeal is over.”
She has always been an important part of his support system.
She has always provided him with generous portions of sibling revelry, whether it be of the emotional or stylistic variety, while she supplied me with the efficiency of editors’ cuts.
“Say less.”
This is how we’re going to get through it.
I’m not talking about his last year of high school. Or the wave of stressors that will visit as our youngest fords the approaching rapids that, we hope, will launch him (successfully) into higher education.
I’m only talking about senior pictures.
Honestly, I thought one day he’d be glad to have access to an archive of a magnitude that no second child of the 70s would ever be able to fathom.
Naturally, he rebelled. His face stretched and morphed into cartoonish shapes as if he even suspected me of thinking about snapping a photo of him.
And naturally, the photographic likenesses of him have dwindled as the teen years barrel forward.
Why is this so hard?
All I want is one good picture that can go in a yearbook so we can seem …normal. But it seems inevitable that he is set on having a goofy selfie appear in place of my best intentions.
I thought I knew how to do this. … I had been the official photographer of their entire youth. Documenting every play date, every birthday party, every moment of every zero-score sports ball season since 2009 as if it were breaking news. A zillion moments through which they might one day sift.
“Yeah … I hate that. I don’t want to do it.”
I can direct him to a place where the sun isn’t too spicy, where it won’t make his eyes turn into slits. I can tell him to stand this way, or that. I can walk him through the process of putting his best side forward: “Lift your chin slightly …not that much. Lower just a bit … too far.
But I can’t make him smile.
His sense of humor gets edgier and sharper to the point of cutting.
I lose patience. Read him the Riot Act, further enshrining the cycle of weaponized maternal guilt: How “I risked life and limb for him for nine months and all the rest of my years, the least he could do is give me nine minutes of his time and a smile.”
I feel a quiet hand on my arm, his sister to my rescue.
“Hey, champ. I don’t care what mom wants, but you CAN NOT be the weird kid who stands on his head or takes a picture of his left nostril. I deserve better. You’re connected to my LinkedIn.”
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