Picture Day: A Family Drama
“This Wednesday is Picture Day!” Flashes the notification on the ParentSquare app letting me know I’ve received communication from my kids’ new school. The teacher’s exclamation-point to period ratio is at least as bad as my own. I see now why this is not the best punctuation to over-do because the symbol doesn’t actually inspire reciprocal excitement. I skim the message, scanning info about the date, the time, the order form, etc. And then I see it — the sentence that will bring me to my knees: “I look forward to seeing everyone’s combed hair, clean shirt, and bright smiles!”
What does he mean by combed hair? “Combed” is a subjective descriptor, and one that happens to be a touchy subject in the relationship between my daughter and me. This highly perceptive, deeply feeling, impassioned little seven-year old happens to take her hair and clothes very, very seriously, in a way that already makes this being I pulled forth from my own feel somehow un-relatable. It is more truth than self-deprecation to say that style is not my superpower. For example, I completely forgot to wear any jewelry to my own wedding, something I can’t imagine my daughter would ever do. But alas, she gets to be her own person, and is one of my very best teachers at that.
Speaking of teachers, I don’t imagine her professor of the second grade, the school photography enthusiast himself, knows the spin-out he caused our family the morning of our very first public school picture day. Up until now, my children, 7 and 5, have only attended forest school. They were practically expected to look unkempt on picture day. How else could they personify the spirit of the outdoor, lord-of-the-flies, tree-hugging organization that was their first schooling. Come to think of it, in my total of seven years as a parent, no one has asked me to make sure my kids have clean shirts and combed hair — not once.
I do comb my daughter’s thick, wavy tresses a few times a week, while she’s in the bath, and only with the help of a palmful of conditioner. I do it because I think it qualifies as a hygiene issue and could otherwise constitute neglect. I have to make sure no crazy knots form at the nape of her neck because I’ve had those, and they hurt. Other than that, I let her do her hair and pick out her own clothes. Truthfully, she’s already at least as skilled as I am when it comes to all these tasks. If I’d been thinking clearly, I would have remembered this fact and let her do her thing the morning of Picture Day. But no, I felt obligated by that prickly sentence to make sure, as the adult, that the other adults, I suppose, would approve of her hair and clothes.
As the children sat at the counter eating their breakfast on that fateful morning, I stood behind them and began combing my fingers and palms over the back of their heads, trying casually to smooth their hair and hoping this simple intervention will suffice. “Ouch!” Daughter says. “Stop. That doesn’t feel good.”
Well, there goes that idea. We preach bodily autonomy in our family and no means no. “Okay,” I say, “After breakfast I want you to brush your hair out. It’s picture day and your teacher asked you to come with brushed hair. Can you do it?”
“Yes,” she responds confidently, “I’d rather do it myself.”
She excuses herself to get to work. Meanwhile my five year old, who is already wearing his one collared shirt, buttoned uncomfortably looking all the way to the tippy top button, drags his sleeves dangerously close to the maple syrup on his plate. His hair, also thick and a bit outgrown and shaggy looking, has formed — from his night spent rolling around in a mess of blankets, pillows, stuffed animals and treasures — a singular spike sticking straight out of the very top of his head. “We’re going to have to do something about that antenna,” I say lovingly, realizing it’s not going to lay down without a fight. I make some trips back and forth to the faucet, hoping some dribbles of water will help his blondish fluff behave.
“I like my antenna! I can hear music all the time, wherever I go, because I have an antenna right on top of my head!” He chirps cheerfully.
Now I’m sitting behind him, helping him pull on socks and shoes, resting my chin on the antenna itself. “Well, when the picture people ask why your hair is sticking straight up, please tell them it’s so you can always hear the music. I’m sure they’ll appreciate that.”
I head back to check on Daughter’s progress and I find her in the bathroom where she has also attempted the splash-of-water trick. I wonder where she learned it? From behind her at the sink I can see that she has wetted only the top front of her hair, successfully flattening about three inches and down from the part on both sides, while the bottom portion is dry and wavy, and the entire back is untouched, voluminous bed-head. It’s like she’s cut and pasted three different states of hair onto her head. I begin to panic, conflicted between needing to make her hair look like what I think they are expecting at school, and knowing that she will be both pissed off and hurt if I do or say anything. I choose the former, and it comes out as stressed as I feel. “I have to do something with your hair, it’s not working” I say, and immediately regret it. Now she is also panicking, and I can see I have done one of the things I would most like to never, ever do to my kids, which is make them insecure.
Her voice is raised and she’s starting to flail. Because of me she is unhappy with her hair and she feels helpless to change it. I try to walk it back. “No, you’re right, it’s fine. It’ll dry and then come together. Once you move around it’ll all look natural again. I’m sorry. You’re right. No really, it’s fine. It’s just hair! You always do your hair great!” She doesn’t believe me. Before I can go on, I see that Son has now dunked his entire head under the faucet, getting water all over his shirt, the counter, and the floor. It’s a flood. I stop him but I realize, this is his only collared shirt. Also, we are running out of time.
My husband is here somewhere but he’s not helping because we had gotten into a tiff about the order form — the fucking Picture Day order form. There was only one in one of the Dragon Binders and we were supposed to have two, one for each kid. “When you get there, you have to send this one filled out with the kindergarten class and go to the office to get another one for the second grade class,” I’d explained when we first rubbed our sleepy eyes open only slightly earlier that morning.
“Why can’t we just use this form for both of them?”
“I don’t know, we just can’t.” He didn’t believe me and now we aren’t talking. The timing is shit.
I whisk Son and his obviously wet shirt into my bathroom and dig out a hairdryer I haven’t used since before Firstborn came along. Carefully so not to burn him, I start blow drying his shirt. It’s working, but over the sound of the hairdryer I hear said firstborn because her mood has taken a turn for the worse. I hear her raging from the opposite side of the house.
When I find her she yells “First you tell me my hair isn’t good then dad tells me my clothes aren’t okay and now I don’t want to go! I hate Picture Day! Its not fun!” I look at her clothes and see that she’s wearing a red plaid shirt with a white and hot pink leopard print skirt. I am shocked that in my attention to her hair I managed not to notice the brightly colored clash that is her outfit. Now that I’m taking it in, I somehow love it and hate it in equal measures. And I know her dad is right. It’s not Picture Day worthy. I mean it’s clean, but, it looks a little nuts.
Even more blaringly obvious than that her outfit doesn’t work is the hurt on her face. We’ve insulted her, around something in which she takes pride, because we cared more about what other people thought of us. I feel ashamed. I immediately start groveling. “Oh honey, I’m so sorry. You’re so right. It’s not fun, we’ve made it not fun for you this morning and I’m so sorry. How can I cheer you up? You look so sad. What if I play kitten?”
That may seem like a weird left turn, but in our family, when someone is really sad or down, we sometimes take turns cheering each other up by pretending to be a kitten or a puppy. I’m gonna say that one of the children started it but to be honest I don’t really remember. And you know what? It’s really effective. Usually.
As I previously stated would eventually happen, I fell to my knees. I began crawling on hands and knees, trying to purr even though I can’t exactly roll my r’s, nudging her with my forehead as if hoping for a scratch. Normally this results in fits of laughter and some snuggles. Not today. Not on Picture Day. Feeling desperate to turn a corner I roll all the way over, my back pressed awkwardly into the hardwood floor, putting my “paws” up in the air, gesturing for her to scratch my belly. Finally she breaks, giggling and laughing graciously at what I can only imagine is a most pathetic, pitiful attempt to smooth over my terrible mothering.
I continue a mixture of compliments and empathy with the suggestion that jean shorts would be more Picture Day appropriate and somehow they get to school on time, with fairly clean shirts, reasonably combed hair, and one order form each. A few hours later I am sitting in front of my therapist where I am scheduled to discuss my work and work related issues, but know that I have to set those items aside because what I need right now is to confess. I have to confess what a terrible mother I have been this morning.
I begin to relay the story of our Picture Day morning to my therapist and I realize from her laughter and empathy, much to my relief, that the point of this story is actually not that I am a terrible parent. The point of the story is more like — wow. This is so fucking hard. As I hear myself describe the whole thing, I recognize that my brain did one of the things brains are wired to do, which is focus on the bad stuff in an attempts to keep us safe from harm. While I had done a number of things right that morning, from being patient with my son, to giving my husband and I time to cool off, and even repairing a rupture with my daughter, the only part of the whole crazy morning my brain had repeated like a skipping record was the moment I said the shitty thing to my daughter. If I hadn’t decided to process the whole thing aloud with someone safe and understanding, I might still be stuck on that one little beat. It takes intention to zoom out and look at the whole story and all the complex layers therein, or at least as much of it as we might have access to at any given time.
In zooming out, I begin to see a bigger picture. How many times as a parent have I felt pinned between what I sense other adults expect of me as a parent and how I actually want to parent my kids? It is the metaphorical rock and a hard place and it started if not as soon as I became pregnant, definitely by the time I gave birth.
Not only am I stuck between what I believe is the right response to my kids and what it seems is either “normal” or what other people think is best, but because there is a gap between my humanness and my ideals, I can’t always do it the way I want to. Even in the moments when I can completely set other peoples’ stuff aside. Part of me knew — knew — the teacher’s sentence, sticking out of that email like the proverbial sore thumb, was not very appropriate, it still ruled me that morning as if I was actually the elementary school aged child and not the mother of two. As I suddenly connect with how helpless and out of control I felt all morning, I picture little second grade me, on Picture Day in 1991. Not that I remember how that morning went, but the resulting picture lives clear as day in my mind. My bangs have been curled with a curling iron to produce waves about three inches in height above my forehead. My hair around my bangs has been blowdried unnaturally smooth. I’m wearing a dress that was close to on trend in the eighties and was handmade by my grandmother, which meant not to be stained, damaged, or dirtied in any way. I can’t remember the details, but I feel uncomfortable when I think about how I looked that day, a discomfort I can’t help but imagine I have reenacted with my children on their Picture Day all these years later. This, I know, is how shit rolls downhill and gets passed on from one generation to the next.
Another place I was caught between a rock and a hard place and in my own gap between ideal and real was in my attempt to cheer up my distraught child. I wholeheartedly believe in the importance of letting children (and grown ups) have their feelings. Typically, distracting away our feelings leads to repression and eventually becomes challenging symptoms. But it’s not black and white. There are times when a child (or adult) becomes dysregulated and what they actually need is help calming down. In these moments, distraction can be useful and healthy. The paradoxes are everywhere. On Picture Morning, the rub was that if I took the time to attend to her feelings in a more thorough way, we really would have been late and Son would have missed his picture altogether. This was a lose lose for me. Bad mom if I distract her away from her feelings. Bad mom if I miss my child’s first school picture appointment. Thus the kitten impersonation. And the reality of parenting.
Sometimes we must pick the least problematic option, and regardless of what we choose, we may be ruminating on said choice as if we are to blame for the conundrums we face.
It turns out, because my children are still so young I have something like TEN more school picture days with both of them to try to get this right. Or at least better. In an attempt to hold myself with the same loving kindness I would hold literally anyone else around me, what I am reminding myself is that this was my very first time navigating this surprisingly loaded and challenging morning. I didn’t know before because I’d never before done school Picture Day as a parent. But now I have. I will dust myself off, hug my children, and let it go, knowing it was rough, I did the best I could, and I’ll have another go around next year. And if I end up in full-kitten mode again, hey, it could be a lot worse. I will acknowledge when I unconsciously repeat an helpful experience, succumb to the pressures of others, or fall onto to my knees within the gap between the ideal and the reality. It’s the awareness of what happened that will help me learn and grow, and there’s just no way to snap a pretty picture of that process.