This is What My Camera Reel Revealed About My Life in an Open Marriage

I moved to the other side of my camera lens for a change

Mothers are notoriously absent from photos.

We amass thousands of photos of our children, sometimes taking hundreds a day to capture every fleeting instant before it slips away.

It’s easy to become so enamored with these children we created that we can’t stop gathering images of their every feature and movement.

It’s easy to feel that we are the observers of moments and not the ones in them.

When I look back in my phone’s camera reel, there is a clear line demarcating my life before and after children. Before children, I am posing at weddings. I am kissing my husband in front of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. I am huddled with friends around tables in restaurants where we lingered long after finishing our meals.

After kids, there are thousands of close-ups of my children’s faces. There are thousands of first moments — the first time my baby smiled, the first time he lay in the grass in the sun, the first time we traveled by ferry boat.

Sometimes I make brief appearances in these photos, but I am often purely utilitarian. I am the shoulder they are leaning against, the hands holding them up to touch the glass in the sea otter exhibit at the zoo.

Sometimes you only see a glimpse of my hair or the collar of my shirt. Sometimes I am fuzzy and out of focus.

Except that when I look more closely at this photo timeline of my life, when I scroll more slowly through these years and months of photos, there is not just a before and after kids.

There is actually a sudden burst of me right in the middle.

In a short time period between January and June of 2020, I suddenly find photo after photo of my face, close up, smiling into the camera. It’s as if this woman burst into my life for a few months and I couldn’t stop taking photos of her every feature.

This blip of time where I appear in my photos coincides with the months my husband and I opened our marriage.

I had become so desperate for connection, so in need of an escape from the drudgery of our day-to-day lives, that I plead with him to let me sleep with other men. I thought there was a chance it would be good for our marriage.

When I was granted this physical freedom, I felt sexy in front of other men for the first time in more than a decade. And I noticed myself more.

I noticed when the light caught my face in a flattering way in my car’s rearview mirror, or when freckles started accumulating on my nose after I spent endless afternoons outside with my boys during the lockdown. I noticed the curve of my butt as I slid on my jeans in front of our full-length mirror.

During this time of sudden self-observation, I moved to the other side of the camera lens for a few brief months.

I felt an urge to capture these moments of myself, almost in the way I wanted to hold on to memories of my own children.

Of course, these photos weren’t all for my own archives.

I took some of these photos to send to other men. Selfie exchanges are now a currency of dating that didn’t exist in my past. I felt proud to send these photos of my face to the men I dated.

I took most of these photos for one man in particular, the man I eventually fell in love with during the lockdown. We matched on a dating app, and I texted him randomly one day while folding my sons’ laundry.

I believe my first words to him were, “How are you holding up with all of this?”

That text led to many more. Weeks later we arranged to meet, and then we fell in love.

This love affair was like none I’d ever experienced, and not just because I was married. Our meetings were limited to two evenings a week. This was the arrangement I’d made with my husband given the uncertainty of the pandemic. This was the time before rapid at-home tests, and before we knew much about the virus.

Our twice-weekly arrangement would only continue as long as my lover lived alone, worked from home, and didn’t see anyone else indoors. My family did the same.

This man, my lover, became the fifth person in my family’s Covid bubble.

Because of our limited time together, my lover and I spent all day communicating by text. I sent him selfies of me with my boys on our lockdown outings to the woods, or photos of myself alone in my room.

Surprisingly, none of these photos were overtly sexual. I sent him no nudes or provocative poses. I was excited just to send him reminders of me and to share my life with him in this way.

This exchange continued for some time, even after he became my ex-lover and we stopped seeing each other in person. I started working through my complicated feelings about marriage and committed to virtual couple’s therapy with my husband. But our texting was more difficult to stop.

And then one afternoon I paid a hair dresser to come to my porch to cut my hair, and I liked the way I looked. I dared to send him just one more text of me, and my husband found out. So I stopped sending photos to him completely.

I stopped taking photos of myself at all.

Now my camera reel is back to being photos of my children, and there are fewer and fewer of these as my children get older.

I’ve tried to remind myself to take photos of myself when I’m feeling good, to honor myself the way I began doing back then. I wish I could say I have started up a new practice of selfie self-love. But I don’t usually like to see photos of myself these days, and I rarely remember to take them in the first place.

This could be a sad story about finding yourself and losing yourself again. Maybe it is a sad story like that, if I only looked at my phone’s camera reel.

But I’d like to think that the writing I’ve started doing this year is my new form of selfie.

I don’t admire myself in mirrors much these days, and I’m still absent from my phone’s camera reel. But I am finding new ways to ensure that I’m no longer absent from the frame.

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