Crow’s Feet and All

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As evidenced by the number in the bottom corner of this picture, I snapped this for my 365 Challenge. I've made it a habit, every couple of weeks, of scanning my Flickr set for this project to make sure I've got a good mix of subjects; namely not just Max!
As part of it, I'm trying to a self-portrait, or at least to include myself somehow in the photo, at least every couple/few weeks. Just like with scrapbooking, there's a lot of talk amongst us MWACs (Mom With A Camera) about including ourselves in our photos; it's so much easier to snap the shots of Max playing, or Max and Jamie, or Max and Geoffrey, or Max and Nana, or Max and ____{insert any name but mine}______ than it is to get photos of myself.
As women, we tend to be hyper-critical of ourselves; I can see a gorgeous photo of myself, snapped by a talented photographer, where I'm wearing a great outfit, in a gorgeous environment, with yummy light and perfect composition and a real smile, and all I can focus on is that a chunk of my hair isn't sitting right, or the clasp of my necklace is showing. It's annoying, and I hate it, but I can't help it.
Just like they use that “exposure therapy” technique for people with phobias, I'm fighting my resistance to liking photos of myself by taking more of them. Today, I was home alone for the afternoon. Jamie and Max were off helping my parents with some electronics setting upping, and the dreary grey day opened up just a bit as I sat on the couch, and the light got lovely.
I grabbed my camera, rested it on the back of the couch, and shot off a dozen or so frames. Of myself. Close-up and everything.
I'm in a grubby sweatshirt, and my hair is only OK, but I took them anyway. I experimented with angles, facing one way and the other, I tried looking every direction but at the camera, I tried eye contact… snap snap snap.
As I uploaded the photos to my computer and tried to narrow them down, this one really jumped out at me. (Side note: Some of them were really and truly awful pictures of me. I can't do that ponderous gazing off into the distance look… I just look weird.) It wasn't that much of a challenge to narrow them down; it wasn't like when I'm looking through shots of Max, where there's a hundred that I love and I only need one. Of the dozen-ish I shot, I tossed about eight of them right off. The others, it wasn't too hard again to narrow it down to this one. (Another side note: I'm not good at not-smiling pictures. I just look pissed off at something)
So I've settled on this picture. I start working on my standard editing; a little color pop, a sharpening effect, that sort of thing. Just as I was zooming in to fix a stray eyebrow hair, it hit me.

I look like a grown-up.

For just a second, I saw myself the way I appear to the rest of the world. A 33 year old woman, a wife and mother. An adult. I see the lines appearing on my forehead, the beginnings of the crow's feet that will only deepen with the passing of time. I wonder when those lines started appearing; I look back at my ID photo from my senior year in high school. I'm still me, I can see that for sure, but the lines of my days have been etched on my face. The crinkles and wrinkles are all signs of a life well-lived. (And now I have “Tracks of My Tears” stuck in my head. Awesome.)
This is the face that Max sees; this is the face he knows as his Mommy's. This is the face that Jamie tells he loves, the forehead he kisses. And it's the one that I see looking back at me in the mirror every morning, so I might as well get used to it!
The changes are slow, and there are those days when I wake up and would *swear* that there's a new dent where there wasn't one the day before, but it's what I've got to work with, so I'll just acknowledge each line as it makes its debut… one more bit to remind me to be thankful that I'm still around to gain those lines of age.