What Your Christmas Card Says About You As A Mother

First, I know that the cardinal rule of blogging is never to say, "sorry I haven't blogged in a while" but rules are made to be broken. Also, apparently, are brand-spanking-new HP laptops. Yep, got one from my dh on my birthday, November 17th, and the day we returned from our post-Christmas vacation, kaput, dead, hard-drive failure with everything, and I mean, everything, that I have done or worked on in the past 6 weeks wiped out. Not so good.

Thankfully, Bob's a computer genius, and is now working on some sort of restoration, but it makes me sick to my stomach that I have no backup anywhere. Why, you may well ask? I don't know ... I'm an idiot. And an idiot without a computer, which in 2009, feels very weird indeed. So odd that I didn't even want to touch another computer. I mean, it was too fresh, the pain, and I still had hope of restoration. But this is taking too long, so back to work! :) On the limping-along, very old laptop that we were scared would die. But here it is. Interesting.

Back to the point of my post. It's going to make sense in a minute. Bob and I started sending cards out as a couple back in the last century. Before we were married, but after we had made the committment to get two dogs together. I think we dressed them up as Santa and a reindeer and made them pose for 100 photos (this was pre-digital, mind you, so it entailed multiple trips to 1-hour photo to see if we had gotten the shot). We amused ourselves thusly until we had Cameron, and then he and the dogs posed together for a couple years. When we had Lila in 2000, though, we realized that something was missing from the photo.

Us.

I mean, our dogs were cute and all, and so was our kidlet, but who really cared about them, other than grandparents and a couple of their many aunts? I looked around at all the cards I was taking down last night (hey, our tree's still up as well!) and noticed that well over 50% of them are photos of kids only. Some of the kids I know, but many are from friends I haven't seen in years, so I don't know the kids from Adam. Even Adam's actual kids -- how can I see who's nose is whose if I haven't seen him since the early 90s? I want to see you, my friends. Sure, include the kids (now that would be really odd, a Christmas card with only the parents on it!) -- but I think family photos sans the people who are responsible for the family says something not great.

It says that we have become invisible. That's something I fight against at One Hot Mama -- we want moms to say, "I'm here, too!" Life is not all baby sick and $900 strollers and how much sleep we got. We matter. And we should look good enough to be in a picture with the people that gave us grey hair. Toss on a little lipstick or fix it with Photoshop. As long as you're smiling and look like yourself, that's all that matters. I want you to remember that you're still a person, albeit one with spit-up on your shoulder. Hey, if bird poop on your shoulder is lucky in some cultures, think of what gallons of baby vomit can do for you!

So, even though Christmas and Hannukah and New Years are long gone, remember to keep yourself in the picture this year. Promise?