My family history can look pretty ugly. Not in the tragic, broken kind of way, or in the disturbed Law & Order kind of way, but actually, aesthetically, ugly. And when I say aesthetically ugly, I don’t mean to say that we are physically hideous as family. I just mean to say that my dad’s obsession with documenting every moment of all of our lives either with photos or videos – and I don’t just mean lifetime milestones, I mean while working on a school project, or literally just waking up in the morning, moments where nobody is necessarily looking their best – and it is just not flattering.
My mom goes the other direction. Really staged shots.
Jackie was supposed to be a smiley cowgirl on a pony. It didn't really work out.
And Mom likes things to match. There’s a line of frames across our mantelpiece of my sister and I at various ages from babies to when I’m about ten, and was physically large enough to literally refuse to wear matching outfits with my sister or – more horrifying to me as I got older – outfits that coordinated with my sister and my mom.
There are many, many more where this came from.
Or how about matching with your entire extended family, every other year, and taking many, many photos of it in public places?
Fourteen Butlers in matching shirts = Craziness.
I admit that it is funny to look through my dad’s candid albums – funny in the good kind of way, where when you look back a few years later, you can laugh at the days in the 90s when all you would wear are shorts overalls with only one shoulder strap latched and those orange jelly sandals from the Gap. And admittedly, the matching outfits are pretty cute on little kids, and I used to love matching with my mom. When I was five.
It was less appealing when I turned thirteen.
That year, my mom’s love of staged photos and matching outfits intersected again for the first time since I began actively rebelling against it several years prior. Only now, it was further agitated by her fixation with The Perfect Christmas Card to print up on thick, matte stationery and mail to everyone in our phone book.
My mother knew we didn’t like matching outfits anymore, she said, but these weren’t outfits, they were sweaters. Christmas sweaters. And it would be lovely to all wear them and pose in front of the copse of evergreen trees in our yard. My sister and I were not happy, we knew better than to fight my mom on The Christmas Card.
When the box of sweaters came in the mail, and we gathered around to watch my mom tear open the box, I admit I was expecting something only moderately terrible – my mom has pretty good taste. But what I saw made me actually gag a little. Thick, woolly, blue sweaters emblazoned with white reindeer. My dad thought it was funny until he discovered he would be in the photo wearing one too. My mom was genuinely excited. But…who orders Christmas sweaters in blue?!
I’ll spare you the details of the photo shoot itself. Just a lot of really quiet mortification from nearly every member of the family, aside from my mother, who still insisted that the sweaters were beautiful and the photo would be to die for.
At thirteen, I actually thought I would die. But of horror and embarrassment rather than ecstasy, which is what we were all concerned was afflicting my mother. All I will say of the final result – which, by the way, my mother still insists is gorgeous – is that my mother is smiling beatifically in her ugly blue sweater, while each one of us – including my father, who had never been subjected to such an ensemble, and my toddler-aged sister, who obviously knew better than her mother even at that age – looks utterly mortified behind obviously false smiles.
I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to everyone who received one of these in the mail.
There’s my mom is letting loose the full wattage of her best beauty queen, head-tilted smile.Do you see the terror in my eyes? Or the grimace of pain on Jackie’s face? (Please ignore our middle parts, disheveled hair, and awful teeth.) My dad looks more like he is baring his teeth than smiling.
Even our closest friends and relatives couldn’t contain their laughter.
Bottom line: take a trip through some of our dozens of photo albums at your own risk, but avoid those Christmas cards altogether.
College Kate 