When do we get a baby belly picture?
So asked an old school friend back in Nebraska on Facebook the other day. The short answer is “probably never” but I didn’t reply thusly, because I try very hard not to be an asshole, even if I fundamentally am one.
In fact, I never did reply to her because the answer is lengthy, complicated, stupid, and probably doesn’t make much sense. This is about as close as I’ll get to a proper answer, so Sarah, if you’re reading, this is it.
I hate having my picture taken.
Under the best of circumstances, when I’m in a really good mood, wearing becoming clothes, and in all other respects primed to look as nice as I ever will, I photograph badly. If I sense somebody’s pointing a camera at me (and I have amazingly tingly spidey senses for lenses) I get tense, I get a suspicious look on my face, and I somehow manage to comprehensively fuck it up. In almost every photo of me that lurks around Flickr and Facebook, I have a wild-eyed and hostile expression, my arms look all weird, and something about my posture indicates a vague pain somewhere.
And given that I’m a little bit funny-looking to start with, a sketchy facial expression simply guarantees a catastrophic photographic image.
Now I don’t really have a problem with being homely. Lord knows I’ve had years enough to get used to it. I was a funny-looking kid, all ears, teeth, and with a prominent facial birthmark to push it all over the cliff. It took a long time to grow into my features, nose and ears, especially. I remember, when I was about 11 or so, realizing that I was never going to be much of a beauty, realizing that I wasn’t ambitious enough to be part of the honor-roll crowd, and determining that if I was to offer much of anything back to the world, I’d damn well better be funny.
(around the time of that epiphany)
As I caromed from klutzy, homely, awkward childhood into homely, klutzy, awkward adolescence, I obviously didn’t develop a whole lot of grace, poise, and finesse. I was also a damnably late bloomer both physically and emotionally, and it wasn’t until I was nearly entirely an adult that I realized I could look pretty nice in the right clothes and with the right attitude. For far, far too many years I presented myself as a class-clown in deliberately weird clothes, with deliberately odd hairstyles, because I sought to distract people from noticing that I was awkward, homely, and klutzy. My schtik was that of the “goofy girl” and I did it very, very well.
Of course, no boys fancied me, and I was kind of a walking punchline around school, and it was just another avenue into which I could drive my self-consciousness, but at the time, it was the best I could do with what I had.
Now, of course, I’m a grown-assed woman, and am pretty comfortable with being homely and klutzy, so most of the awkwardness has dissipated. I can, and often do, dress nicely, in clothes that are contemporary, that aren’t deliberately far-out, in nice colors and in silhouettes that make the best of my wide-shouldered, straight-hipped, athletic figure. I do my best to do what I can with what I have, knowing that presenting myself as freak-of-the-week is not the best I can do. It’s kind of a good to know that I can circulate amongst normal people without arousing undue comment or discomfort.
However, honestly, my looks are not in the top ten things I enjoy about myself. I still think that I’m kind of an odd-looking woman. I’m totally okay with that, but I don’t really seek to glorify it, nor do I have the give-a-shit to try to mitigate it. And in that lies my reluctance to be photographed. I know I’m not disastrously, traffic-stoppingly ugly, but I also know that I’m not very photogenic, that I have kind of weird features, and because of my self-consciousness, I will somehow contrive to look even weirder on camera. And that’s under the best of circumstances.
Now add in the pregnancy, the oddity of my changing body, and an increased level of self-consciousness as my abdomen expands, and you might be able to see why I’m not taking photographs of myself every week.
Hell yeah, I think it’s insanely cool, the whole process of making a new person. I’m rather fascinated with whatever’s presumably burbling along inside of me, but on the other hand, I don’t love being pregnant. I don’t hate it either, but I am just not that revved up about the whole deal. Another friend said she felt extremely feminine while she was pregnant. Myself, I don’t feel that different from “normal” except that I have to use a bra now, and am wearing some really horrible trousers with a wide, stretchy knit waistband which are somewhat comfortable, but which try to fall off my ass about 167 times a day. I’m more conscious of trying to be careful, of, say, not gassing myself out while spray-painting a bed frame. Or not going mountain biking, or having a beer. I have been riding my bike more cautiously, not heaving myself into corners with reckless and scab-forming abandon. On the whole, I’ve been trying to live as normally as possible, to not let being pregnant become a handicap. For me, pregnancy has largely been a waiting period. Just holding out, waiting for this kid to gestate. I’m more interested in the end result, the baby, the kid, the person he will eventually be.
I think the combination of my not-especially-romanticized attitude toward pregnancy and my essential dislike of being photographed culminates in the result of no intentional baby-bump photos. It’s likely that I’ll get caught in somebody’s i-phone crossfire on Facebook or Flickr eventually, and one or another of my gaily-colored pregnancy-tents will be recorded for posterity, but I can’t promise any deliberate, posed, and progressive photos of my condition, because I can honestly state that I won’t be providing them.
