Don’t take my picture!

November 7, 2011 | My Jottings

My mother always dressed me frilly when I was a little girl. Dad and Mom had two sons fifteen and ten years before I was born, so I think because I was an unexpected baby girl, she delighted in making sure I was in ruffles, hats, and patent leather shoes whenever it was time to dress up. I distinctly remember preferring bare feet, shorts and dirt smudges on my face, but once in a while I had to submit quietly to curlers and bobby pins in my hair and a poofy dress with a huge satin bow tied in the back.

I remember a few photos my father took of me on Easter Sunday when I was three years old. After Sunday School my parents and I went over to my grandparents’ house to visit. I was a child who always seemed to have an earache, and that Sunday I had a bad one. A couple of the pictures were of me leaning with one hand against the rough bark of a southern California palm tree, and covering my ear from the wind with the other. I was crying. My dad asked me to smile but non-cooperation was the theme for the day, and I think he thought he’d get a picture of my Easter dress later on after I got out of the wind.

I didn’t feel good the whole day. I went outside on my grandpa and grandma’s patio to wander around right outside their garage, and my dad decided that might be the time to snap a few more photos of me in my Easter dress.

I couldn’t find the close-up pictures of a sick little three year old trying to smile for the camera through a whimper, even though I can still see them in my mind.

But I did find this old photo taken that same day, when I had finally had enough. I did not want to smile anymore, I did not want to be in stiff shoes and a scratchy slip under a fancy dress any longer, and I did not want my dad following me around with the camera.

So I did the only thing I knew to do to get him to stop. And before he went back into the house, he took this shot of me issuing my final statement on having my picture taken that day. My family has had a few giggles from this photo over the years.

Looking back on this, I can’t decide if I was a brat, or if it’s just that no one was listening to me.

Today I wonder those same two things…