Her first post was of a large tree in our front yard. Its stringy limbs broke apart the orange and blue sky that melted behind the tree line. It was heavily filtered and captioned “sunrise.” Four people liked it.
My brother and I hovered over her keyboard pressing our fingers to the screen when we saw opportunity, explaining this does that and that does this. She would wave away our sticky hands and scroll through her feed. Of course, that consisted of my post, my brother’s and my aunt’s.
The fourth photo she posted was of me. It was Thanksgiving, some year when I still straightened my hair. Our faces were pressed tightly together at the cheeks, my smile toothy, her eyes wide. She posted more trees splitting the sky. She posted a picture titled "drinks with friends" and she posted a picture of me that I guess I never saw. My skin was painted green and I stood on a stage. Bright lights fell over my tinted skin and glossed my black wig. I was into theater then and I played an ugly troll in a play no one had ever heard of. My mother must have snapped the picture of me without my noticing. In it, I’m smiling and talking to my music teacher who is holding my hands lightly. There are cast members and their friends around me, but I am center stage. That moment in time was likely the only time I stood with the lights falling on me only and she caught it.
After a gold fish, a leg lamp in a window and several more pictures of trees I found a photo of myself down on my knees in the soil of a sand arena. We didn’t have much that our peers didn’t have, but my brother and I found refuge in horses. Every other day he and I slipped on our boots and cleaned stalls for a man in town; in return he let us keep our horses there. My horse, Skylark, was the apple of my eye and my best friend when I didn’t have any. In the photo his neck is craned towards me and his muzzle just brushes my forehead.
For every selfie I took my mother had posted a better picture of me. The me she saw. The me I really was. Through her Instagram, she captured who I really wanted to be. I was a crooked smile, jeans that never fit, a song in the car, and a horse on my hip. While I posted the food I ate, the tea I bought, and my cat, Stephanie, my mother posted pictures of me hugging my brother, riding the horses, singing on stage, and accepting awards. The things I never dared to blog.
Through the eyes of my mother’s follower I liked to smile, I liked to dance, and I loved my family. Through the eyes of my mother’s follower I looked just like her but acted like my dad. Through the eyes of my mother’s follower…I was happy.
Through the eyes of my follower, I probably liked to smoke weed. Through the eyes of my follower I would have never taken a singing lesson, let alone win awards for youth opera. Through the eyes of my follower I listened to loud music and wore lots of black. To a set of strange eyes on another rolling screen I was a sad girl who didn’t talk about horses, or music, or theater, I was a girl sitting in a crowded room full of smoke and empty Gatorade bottles. I was a middle finger to the screen and a pizza captioned "bae."
I like to think my pictures have grown with me. There are more pictures of my brother and my dog now. Skylark and text messages between my mom and me litter my page. For years I spent my days trying to find who I was, what I wanted to wear and who I wanted to be. Never once did my mother reject me, never once did she doubt who I was, never once did she cease to snap pictures of me with dirt on my cheek, a kitten on my shoulder, or with muffin remains on my nose. Maybe my mother always knew who I’d be; maybe she never lost sight of that. To see myself through my mother’s Instagram shows me that I was always there. The "me" I was craving to be had been trying to bust the seams of my identity crisis since the day it began.
My mother tells me she’s lived two lives, the life she led before she was a mother and the life she has now. All those years, she thought she knew who she was, but it was a fragile life to have been shattered by a tiny finger wrapped around her thumb. Like my mother I am learning more about myself every day, but I’m trying to be more like the girl on my mother’s Instagram.
