Mutha Magazine |best| | Allison Carr

The lens of motherhood is always smudged. It’s smudged with peanut butter, with tears, with the grease from your own unwashed hair. You can try to clean it, but the second you put the phone down, another tiny hand will reach out and touch it again.

She pointed to it. “Mama. Sad.”

Why? Because it was real. Because even at two, she knows the difference between a smile and a truth. allison carr mutha magazine

I think about that photo my daughter found. The “sad” one. In it, I am not performing. I am not trying to be a “good mom” for the ‘gram. I am just being a mom. My hand is dirty. The light is fluorescent. The moment is ugly. And yet, that is the photo she was drawn to. Not the Easter portrait. Not the beach sunset. The Tuesday morning apocalypse.

Then I became a mother, and I realized the filter is a lie. The real work of raising children is not about perfecting the image; it’s about learning to see through the smudge. The lens of motherhood is always smudged

By Allison Carr

I looked at the blurry Tuesday photo one more time. She was right. It wasn’t sad. It was just the truest thing I’ve ever taken. A smudge on the lens. A whole world inside it. She pointed to it

There is a specific grief in that realization. Not a tragedy, but a low-grade mourning for the woman you used to be—the one who could read a novel for three hours on a Sunday, the one whose body belonged only to her, the one who didn’t know the precise texture of vomit at 2:00 AM versus 4:00 AM. We don’t talk about that grief enough. We talk about postpartum depression and anxiety (thank god, finally), but we don’t talk about the mundane melancholy of missing your old self while simultaneously holding the new self you would die for.