Portrait of a Mother

The night before this picture was taken, my boys had been up from 3am-6am. They were still recovering from our red eye flight from San Francisco to NYC.  I'll never book that again. Especially without Rob! He got called off to a business meeting in Seattle, and I was flying solo with all the kids. The flight wasn’t so bad, but recovering from it was awful.

I was exhausted the next morning but stoked to pawn my kids off and attend Alt Summit. During the lunch break, a friend asked if I was ever going to have more kids. I told her, “NoWAY! Never! Absolutely not!”.

She responded jokingly, “When you talk about your kids, you make it sound like you’ve been traumatized. Have kids traumatized you? What happened?!”

All I could do was laugh like a lunatic while I failed to articulate an answer. It was at that moment, photographer Justin Hackworth snapped this photo of me.

When I saw it, I noticed my tired eyes, worn off lipstick, and a frozen laugh. I'm on the verge of true happiness, a nap, or about to cry hysterically while I tell her how exhausted I am.  Anything could have happened in the next frame.

It's because of this unknown, I feel like this picture captures my experience with motherhood perfectly. Traumatized yet blissfully happy indeed!