Perspective

July 7, 2012January 21, 2014 by nance In Writing 5 Comments

Life is all about perspective, right? How you view the world and yourself in it? While we were on our mini vacation last week, Jason and I discovered that our perspective on our life with toddlers is so much more upbeat when we take lots of pictures. Look back at this post for evidence. Don’t we look so happy, so ain’t-life-grand? In reality, that morning was pretty rough. I said that Gryffin was sort of grumpy, which was actually the understatement of the year. But in the late afternoon, while the boys were napping, Jason and I looked over the photos and both of us felt like the morning had been a real hit. We reminded ourselves that we were both fed up and frustrated, had a minor argument of our own, the boys full of their own cranky toddler drama and it was actually kind of rotten. But you’d never know it by looking at the pictures. It changed our perspective.

Back in college, in my rhetoric course, we spent a small portion of the semester talking about picture-taking. How pictures can change our perspective and our experience of something. Do you remember your wedding, say? Standing at the end of the aisle and that thrilling feeling as you gazed at your spouse-to-be? Or do you remember the pictures of your wedding? Or the video? Based on those conversations in college, Jason and I discussed at great length before we had Gryffin and Isaiah about whether or not to videotape their births. I wanted to remember it from my own perspective, to recall how it felt to push them out of my body, to feel them in my arms, not just what it looked like on camera. In the end, we decided to go for it and Jason put together some incredible videos for each birth. I’m so grateful that we have them. But it did change my perspective and the way that I remember them. A little. Not entirely because I made an effort to be mindful of it, to write down their birth stories as well and to preserve the experience in other ways .

With all of that in mind, I got rather hooked during our vacay on taking photos of some of our everyday experiences. Jason and I enjoyed pouring over the photos each evening and it brought out the highlights of each day. And that really helps a glass-half-empty kind of gal like myself (that feels sort of embarrassing to admit, that I’m a glass-half-empty sort, but my mom always said I had a real flair for the melancholy and it’s true). Here are some shots of yesterday morning at the spray-ground in Ballard. Was Isaiah rather ornery all morning and unwilling to get in his carseat without tears and drama? Yep. Was Gryffin bawling his eyes out in time-out in the garage before we even left the house? You bet. Did I tweak my back and spend the evening on the couch, unable to move or breath without great pain? Sure did. But I didn’t take photos of those moments. Here are the ones I did take. I captured some of the genuinely good moments of the day. I look at these and I don’t think about all the difficult moments. I just smile and think ain’t life grand?

Gryffin when the water started spraying for the first time