I wonder if other moms feel this? This deep-seated anxiety that something is forgotten, or someone will be disappointed, or what is done is not enough?

There are a lot of things I didn't accomplish this Christmas.

But you know? Christmas will come tomorrow anyway. And hopefully my anxieties will be unfounded and everyone will love the day. Because it's here! And it will be wonderful!

I hope your Christmas is wonderful, too.

It's 12:40 a.m. Everyone but me is asleep, and I'm only barely awake: I'm just waiting for the washer to finish so I can hang up Kendell's gym clothes so they'll be dry for a trip to the gym in the morning. (I haven't yet convinced him that if he had more than one set of gym clothes it would be for ME, not him.) I'm tired and droopy and a little bit sad, because we've just been watching the pilot episode of Chicago Fire, back from early September, and glimpsing commercials from September just makes me wonder:

How can Christmas be on Tuesday?

How can December be 2/3rds finished?

How can 2012 be almost behind us?

I want September back again. I want it to be fall again, with the leaves and the temperature and the anticipation of Halloween. I want to feel that calmness I feel in autumn, instead of this anxiety over whether what I've bought will be enough and if the kids like it or be disappointed.

Christmas? I'm only hardly ready.

And 2013? It makes me want to cry just thinking about it. It will be the year we'll have a high school graduate. The year my only daughter heads off into the world. The year everything changes.

How did it get to be December?

How did I get to this place in my life when things are beginning to end?

How can I slow down time, somehow?

One of my scrapbooking failures is that I'm not good at organized stuff or finite projects. I can make some layouts and eventually put them into albums, but that's about it. Things like mini books or December Dailies? I rarely start them anymore because I am learning to be honest with myself, and let's face it: it's rare that I actually finish something finite. Same thing goes with things like Project Life or One Little Word or Photo-a-Day or anything else that requires a scheduled commitment. My scrapbooking time is just too random and unpredictable.

Last year, though, I thought I'd try jumping on the Twelve on 12 bandwagon. The goal is that on the twelfth of each month, you take 12 photos. Then you'd made a layout with those 12 photos, and by the end of the year, voila! Nifty little slice-of-life album. Surely I could manage just taking 12 photos one day a month, right?

I made it through January.

When February 12 came around I was in Salt Lake celebrating my anniversary, and you'd think I could find 12 things to take photos of, but I didn't. I took three pictures that day. And then, even though the there's also the idea that if you missed a 12th you could just take the photos on the 13th, it felt like I'd failed already, because there really SHOULD have been some photographic evidence of that February 12th.

Another scrapbooking fail!

But today, December 12, was a day I was determined to photograph, whether or not I made it to 12 photos. I mean...how often in a person's life is there a 12/12/12? Not very often unless one is very long-lived. (I'm pretty sure I won't live to be 140 and a half!)

And, you know, I didn't make it to twelve. But I decided it didn't matter, because some photographic evidence is better than none, right? So, just for fun, my 12/12/12, with a few photos thrown in:

Our day started at 6:30, when Kendell got up to milk the cow check his email (when I'm feeling anti-morning, which is every single day of my life, and he is up all cheery & early, I always joke—in, yes, I confess, a grumbly, WtH sort of voice—that he needs a cow to milk so as to justify his early-morning wake-up habit) and discovered that Krispy Kreme had a buy one dozen get a second dozen free coupon. So we bought donuts for the kids for breakfast. (I tried to be cheery.)

After we got the kids off to school, we went to Salt Lake to do some returns and spend some time together.

On 12:12 p.m. on 12/12/12, I was at City Creek with Kendell:

I bought two pair of boots, both of which I love desperately for completely different reasons, but I really don't need two pair so between now and when the credit card bill comes I need to choose one of them.

We really had a lovely time. We walked around and window shopped at talked and I even managed a photo with Kendell that isn't of his elbow:

We happened to walk past the fountain just as it was starting its splashing-water-synchronized-to-music routine, and the music just happened to be my favorite Christmas carol, the Carol of the Bells:

(Imagine you can hear the bells!)

Then Becky, who works near City Creek, texted me back (she'd been at lunch with Heidikins, the lucky girl!), so we walked back to the Trax stop to see her and say hello. (Becky's life often seems way more glamorous than mine. She does things like work downtown and ride Trax and walk through City Creek and have lunch with bloggy friends on a regular basis. It reminds me that I really am pretty small-town!) We ended up stopping for a beverage and a long talk.

(All photos courtesy of my cell phone. Are you proud of me?)

Then things got boring and every-day-ish: got some gas, picked up the carpool, ran to Target, took Haley to her night class carpool drop-off spot, cooked dinner (chicken curry), and bought some perfect ribbon for Christmas gifts (which I will be wrapping tomorrow!) at Joann.

How was your 12/12/12?

The members of my family have a wide range of responses to the camera. On one side of the spectrum is Haley, who loves doing photo shoots and of whom a photo is taken nearly every day by someone. Nathan and Kaleb are sort of neutral; Nathan takes a good photo easily, and he doesn't hate it, but he doesn't seek it out. Kaleb is harder to get a good photo of because he can't quite ignore the camera; once he is aware of it his natural smile is impossible for him to form, as if the presence of the knowledge of the existence of the camera in his space makes him forget how to smile—but he doesn't groan about taking pictures, either. I don't love having my picture taken, but I am a staunch believer that the family photographer needs to work on getting in front of the camera sometimes, because our kids need pictures of us, too, so I have been known to sometimes ask someone to take my picture (much to my discomfort).  

On the other end of the spectrum are Jake and Kendell. About seven or eight years ago, Jake decided he hates having his picture taken. He complains vociferously whenever the camera is involved with any experience, photo shoots are an agony of obnoxious behavior, and nearly every photo I have of him either has the duck face or the angry cat frown. Perhaps he inherited this dislike of photography from his father. Ninety five percent of my pictures of Kendell look like this:

He hates having his picture taken more than almost anything else I can think of. But it's not just having his photo taken; he's also annoyed by having to wait for me to take pictures. Floral photography is a particular annoyance, but taking pictures during a hike is also equally offensive to him. We have been known to argue about photography.  

Maybe it is Kendell's aversion to photography that makes me think about the reasons behind my interest (some might call it compulsion) to take pictures. For me, photography is partly about the art—the making of something beautiful (even though I am far from an artist with my camera). I do enjoy learning about photography, paying attention to light and watching for good shots and trying to capture the unposed and the spontaneous. But it is, even more, the desire for memory that pushes me to snap the lens. I want to remember but I know memory is fragile and so I put my camera to my eye. Sometimes this makes me worry that I am photographing my life instead of living it, so I go through phases when I conciously do not take pictures, even when my Inner Photographer is begging me to. And then I look at my pictures and I start seeing gaps so I start taking more pictures.

Sometimes I think it is scrapbooking that causes Jake's reluctance to be photographed. I had this insight one night last week, when I taught him how to make baking powder biscuits. He's been wanting to learn for awhile, and I finally managed to both make a dinner that went well with biscuits (creamy chicken soup) and start it with enough time to teach him. After we had finished, and were eating the biscuits (which were delicious, if a little bit salty), I thought I should've taken some pictures. I could see the images in my head, a close up of his hands in the big white bowl, forming the dough into a ball; a low-angled shot of buttermilk in a glass measuring cup; an impossible shot (unless someone else was also in the kitchen) of his face, concentrating, while I stood behind him, reciting the recipe from memory. And I could see the layout, too, almost: know the colors and patterns I would use to create a mood that evoked what I felt during the experience.

But then I thought about the outcome of photographing the experience. The camera in the kitchen would've turned it from Jake learning how to make biscuits to Amy taking pictures of Jake learning how to make biscuits. An experience about preservation instead of about the experience itself. And the experience itself is enough. Maybe some experiences are more valuable than pictures. Maybe just writing about it in my journal is enough, instead of allowing technology to change the moment.

The camera would've muddled the clarity (and, frankly, the sweetness) of the experience.

I've been thinking about THIS ARTICLE from the New Yorker and how it captures almost exactly my photographic tension. (Go read it and then come back; I'll wait.) I say "almost" because I don't have an iPhone (nor do I want one). I do have an Android phone, and I do take pictures with it, but honestly: just as my little point-and-shoot camera frustrates me because of its limitations, my smart phone camera doesn't fulfill my photographic needs. (I will forever be, I suppose, the lady with the big camera.) I want to keep using my DSLR (and honestly, the thought of only having pictures from a cell phone makes me anxious), but I don’t think the type of camera equipment matters so much as one’s attachment to it.

Allowances for camera types aside, however, I read the essay saying yes. To the feeling of wanting to freeze moments long enough to grab my camera and photograph them.  Yes to feeling sad over allowing my thoughts about a picture to distract me from the moment. Yes to the power that looking at photographs imbibes remembering with—how pictures make it easier to remember, to see patterns, to understand a thing you didn't when you snapped the lens. Yes to this idea: "if you are taking a picture of your children. . .then are you, in that moment, looking at them? Or are you anticipating a moment in the future—it is sometimes ten seconds in the future but it could well be ten years—when you will be looking at this very moment?"

"Yes" is the answer to that question: it is both. Now, and later. Or at least, for me. Despite the tension, both within my family and within myself, I will continue taking pictures, continue risking the sweetness of right now because right now is so sweet I want to remember it tomorrow.

I have been thinking a lot, lately, about happiness. What it really is, how to experience it more deeply, how to help my family feel it more. This thinking started a few weeks ago, when I woke up exhausted, having not slept well the night before, and Kendell said something like "that's only going to get worse as we get older" and suddenly the full force of being forty pounded down on my heart. How did I get to this place in my life where sometimes it feels like the only good things to look forward to are things that will happen to other people? Where my weird chin hair isn't the only evidence of the fact that my body is aging, where suddenly life feels entirely too short?

So I laid in bed and cried for awhile and then I started thinking about happiness. About how I want more of it to infuse this last half of my life, despite whatever challenges come. Can you have happiness during the midst of challenges? I think that is possible. I want to bring that into my life. I want to find ways to feel happy despite. (Sagging skin or lost youth or illness or loss or financial woes or whatever I am not imagining that life might bring me.) And while I feel like part of being happy is the knowledge that those you love love you back (something that is out of my control), I also know that part of happiness comes from me and from how I deal with things. And I know I have the tendency to deal with things by looking for the bad part.

I need to work on that part of happiness. I am working on focusing on happy memories instead of negative ones. On spending more time with what is positive by paying more attention to happiness than hardness. Sometimes this feels very awkward to me, awkward and false as if I am working against my very nature. But I am also starting to notice a little bit of a lessening. My jaw is less tight, my heart races with anxiety less often, my hands less wrung with worry. And I am seeing that the portions of happiness allotted to me are larger than I had imagined.

Take yesterday. Even though we had bad news for Nathan at the dentist (another cavity, poor kid), and Kendell and I had a few words, and I was high strung while making dinner, it was a good day. I had Kendell drop me off in Provo and I ran to my mom's house, a lovely five-mile run along a road I've never ran on before. My route took me past so many old memories, many of them hard, but I tried as I ran to focus on happy memories: those times driving to the telemarketing company I worked for with all my gothy friends, when we'd be laughing in the car with soda cups in our hands and listening to music. The day I rode in my friend Chris's car and first heard the Violent Femmes (it was instant affection). The Chinese restaurant that used to be there and the Valentine's day meal I ate there once with a boy. The hours spent in the library (the one that's gone now) and the gym (that is now an arts center) and even the grocery store (where they had a ten-cent Tuesdays special on donuts).

At mom's house, Becky and I helped her decorate her tree, remarking over how it's impossible that it's been more than twenty years since we made her flowery pink-and-silver balls. My uncle stopped by to tell us that a cousin of his and my dad's had passed away and then regaled us with a story of cutting his leg open while working on a roof and he brought me little flashes of my dad in how he told the story and sprinkled his conversation with cussing and said "ruf" instead of "roof." For dinner I made spaghetti with red sauce and didn't even have to argue about it because Kendell was at a work function. Then we went to Jake's orchestra concert, where they played my favorite Christmas carol (The Carol of the Bells).

It was a good day because it held good things and because I tried to let the bad things go. It was a good day because it was one I lived: breathed, moved, lifted, dropped, laughed, ate, remembered, teared up over music. Because I hugged my mom and I said unspoken things to my sister with my eyebrows and I joked with my sons over spaghetti.

It held happiness and I saw it and that is enough.

How do you define happiness?