My phone's photo album finally has one photo of me

The afternoon I sat down to clean out my phone's photo album, I counted something that made me stop scrolling.

Twenty-three thousand photos. Two thousand of my daughter. A little over a thousand of my husband. My parents, the meals I cooked, our cat asleep on the windowsill, the sunsets I photograph from the balcony whenever the sky turns orange. Photos of me — face forward, in focus, taken across all these years: four. Two of them were for ID cards.

I am the family's official photographer. When my daughter took her first steps, I was the one holding the phone. On every family trip I stand outside the frame. For my mother's sixtieth birthday I shot three hundred photos and retouched every one of them. The sentence I say most often to my family is "Look at the camera." It never occurred to me that I had not properly looked at myself in years.

That night I asked myself: is it shyness? Do I think I photograph badly? Later, in my journal, I dug out the truth, and it was neither. I believed I was not important enough to be recorded. The family's moments were worth keeping. Mine were "nothing to photograph." The thought was so natural that I never once questioned it.

Between thirty and thirty-five I was thin and then heavy, I cut my hair short and grew it long again, I learned to drive, I passed a certification exam, I traveled alone once. All of it happened to me, and none of it is in my album. For years I had been keeping the family's memory. I had not kept my own.

So that day I did three things.

First, I made a new album on my phone and named it "Me." Second, I booked a portrait session — not a family portrait I happened to be standing in, but photographs of me. Third, I sent a notice to the family group chat: "Homework, starting today. If you see me, take my picture. I want to exist in your albums too."

My family thought I was joking. On the day of the shoot the photographer asked me to smile and I couldn't. In front of a camera I was nervous, like meeting a stranger. We worked for two hours. Of all the finished frames, one I love: not a posed smile, but the face I made while talking about my daughter. I stared at that photo for a long time, and then I suddenly wanted to cry. The woman in it had light in her eyes. She was beautiful. For years I had called myself unphotogenic. All that time she had been waiting for me to look at her properly.

The person who keeps everyone else's memories needs someone to keep hers. The first one to start should be herself.

The homework in the group chat went badly at first. My husband kept forgetting. My daughter's angles were crooked. I forgot once myself, and the next day my daughter made up for it with a picture of me mid-yawn — ugly in a way that was somehow cute. I put that one in the album too. After a month there were more than sixty photos of me in there: me cooking, me yawning, me standing with my hands on my hips while I scolded my daughter, me with my eyes swollen from crying at a drama.

Seen together, they let me look at myself whole for the first time. Not a mother, not a wife, not a daughter — a woman who gets tired, laughs, loses her temper, and keeps trying to live well.

Now there are more than a thousand photos of me in that album. My daughter asked why I suddenly love selfies. I said, "Because Mom found out that Mom matters too. Enough to be photographed."

She thought about it for a moment. "Then I'll take your picture from now on. And when you take mine, make Dad take yours."