I am reminded of a story of my youth, so thought I would share with you all this week.

For as long as I can remember (and there are the pictures to prove it), our family participated in the yearly "portrait studio" photos. This was a time of year that we wore our very best clothes, had our hair just perfect, nails clean, and our smiles looking their best....and every year, us kids hated it.I can't remember the exact year, but I believe I was around 10 years old. My brother Travis was 9, sister Carrie was 7 and Lisa was 6 (pretty sure those are the right ages) and off we go to the studio which is about an hour away. On the drive in, my brother and my mom were having a fight. This was the norm, as neither one of them ever really saw eye to eye on most days. Travis was a typical boy, and he made it his priority to push my mother's buttons every chance he could get. On the flip side, my mother played right into it perfectly, thus, fun fun times for the rest of us!! But entertaining nonetheless.

On this particular "perfect portrait" studio day, my brother was a bit relentless, and my mother was panicking. I could tell she was wondering if my brother would get it together and perform well for the camera. And perform he did. Big smiles, and the rest of us girls....picture perfect.

Now at that time, to choose your final portrait was done via proof pages, and the images were quite small. Happily, my mother chose her precious picture of us kids, and patiently awaited its arrival over the next 2 weeks. Time went by and the photos arrived, and my mom whisked them off to Leo Hauck. He would laminate the photos onto a wooden board, bevel the edges, and voila....your photo was perfectly preserved for a hundred years!

I will never forget the day that my mom picked up the picture and brought it home and proudly placed yet another nail in the wall to hang her perfect children. As we all stood back and gazed at the new addition, we noticed something. Something was definitely not right; or was it? Everyone had a picture perfect smile, and my brother's smile was especially perfect. In fact he looked like the cheshire cat. Placed behind my sister Carrie, my brother had his hand perfectly placed on her shoulder. But what was that??? He was giving the finger to the camera and the look on his face was telling my mother that "he would do what he wanted, and too bad for her!!" Well, we have never laughed so hard in all of our lives, and to this day, we talk about that picture and the memories surrounding it. My brother didn't hear the end of it from Auntie's, Grandparent's & my Mom of course.

You see, no picture is ever perfect. No family is ever perfect. No individual is ever perfect. We may try to create a facade for others, but the camera does not lie, and it will capture your reality one way or another. I don't mean this in a negative or threatening way either. This is a good thing. Why would you want your photos to be so perfect that it doesn't truly reflect who you are, and the reality of your life at that time?? As a family, we all knew the reality of our family dynamic at that time, and had it not been for that picture forever etched in time.....we may have forgotten.

Until next week, try to keep your reality alive, and don't live behind the facade of being "perfect." 

(when I find the picture in one of the boxes, I will add it to the post!!)

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