I had a bitter epiphany earlier this month when, (belatedly) editing hundreds of pictures from last Christmas, I realized there was not one photo of me. If an outsider had been scrolling through the documentation of our family?s yuletide bliss, they would likely have surmised that this family did not, in fact, include a wife or mother.
We have thousands of family photos?new baby hospital shots, first birthday candle-blowing shots, beach shots and picnic shots. I am conspicuously absent from most of them. Which is where my bitter epiphany comes in: I realized?while sitting silently with my laptop and my rage?that four years of begging my husband to take more pictures of me with my kids had been utterly pointless. And that if I wanted to leave photographic evidence of my existence in their childhoods, I would have to take matters into my own hands. I’ve tried to do that in the past, with selfies. I’ve taken in the neighbourhood of 17 million of them. They are awkward, and badly composed, and look like the crappy up-close iPhone shots that they are. But if I didn?t take them, there would be no pictures of me with my kids. None. Selfies have become a necessity, to the point that I even researched buying a selfie stick so I could take pictures that looked as if they?d been snapped by someone else. Someone thoughtful, perhaps. *takes a sip of wine*

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