In Defense of Posting Pretty Pictures

It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for the next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day…When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind; and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on. -J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

I’ve been trying to find this image for days – the one above, I mean – because I misplaced it. I knew there was an image of a maternal figure organizing, and tidying, and hiding the nasty bits, and sprucing up the pretty ones in some book I had read years ago but I couldn’t find it. I enjoyed the irony of having lost one of my favorite bits from an old story book – in which some sort of guardian angel salvages all the best and favorite bits – because there is no longer any maternal or other care-giving figure in my life to find them and save them for me. My mother suffers from dementia. She has lost all these things forever.

These days there is much harsh discussion of how people use photos, and images, and blogs, and books to re-frame reality and present their lives in a rosier hue for the consumption of others. I have given this much thought because I am not someone for posting an ugly or tired photo, or a photo of a big mess, and goodness knows I would have the opportunity to take all of those on every day of my life. I could quite easily be accused of presenting only “the prettier thoughts, beautifully aired.”

Peter Pan was published in 1911, long before the days of Instagram and Twitter. People have always longed to pluck the best moments of life, and hold them up for a loving, lingering look. We yearn to air them and put them on top, because life would be a little too hard if we lingered on all the rest of it. Maybe if we hold up the jewel-like moments of the day, and see the light dancing in them, we can live inside them or strive for more moments of the day to be like those very best ones.

A few days ago my daughter’s ballet teacher blew some bubbles for the kids at the end of class. The teacher put on some music — I am fairly certain it was Judy Garland singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow but I can’t swear to it. That was it for me. I watched my child, no longer a baby, jump and catch bubbles, and the tears flowed. Mightily.

They were both sad and happy tears, but mostly sad ones. As I went through my quiet catharsis, my daughter squealed and jumped with the other kids across the room. And I wanted to live in that moment for a bit, that moment of darkness. I didn’t want to snap a photo.

I was also thinking about my mother. Where was my mother? In space, she was downtown at her apartment, not remembering having seen us only the day before. In her mind, I am not sure where she was. In my mind, she was 22 years old, taking the crosstown bus to The 46th Street Theater to perform in How To Succeed In Business (Without Really Trying).

There is a place in your head where too many images and feelings collide and I don’t think even Mrs. Darling could clean up the mess of that place while you slept. I tried to root around in the darkness and find the tender spot from which the tears were springing, to find out why this particular moment of joy in my child’s life was connected so powerfully to my mother’s decline.

Of course there are all the obvious reasons. I want my mother to be as she was and to watch this jewel of a grandchild grow up. I want her to remember her time with her granddaughter. I want her to see her, perhaps, become a dancer, if that is a road she chooses. My mother was a beautiful dancer, and my daughter looks so much like her on some days. I want my daughter to have happy times with my mother, and to know her as she was before she started losing her mind. But the hour has grown late much too soon for my mother, and that is no longer possible.

And so the tears flowed.

Time is short and it doesn’t return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, Loss, Loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition. -Tennessee Williams

When we take a photo and squeal with success over “capturing” a beautiful moment, we are devoting ourselves to the opposition of Time.

People have the beautiful photos all wrong. We don’t post pretty photos to misrepresent our lives or fool our friends. We are trying to fool Time. We will fail in this aim, of course, but that only makes the effort more noble.

Leslie Kendall Dye is an actor living in New York City. She was a nanny for a decade before having a child of her own, who is now nearly three. She writes (of course!) at her blog Hungry Little Animal.