I learned it early, the face my mother would make when we tried to take a photo of her. The split-second shiver of discomfort that would ripple through her body, sometimes accompanied by a verbal protest. She’s not often in the home videos, but her voice is. I hear it curling into the same pitches my own does when I am talking to my son from behind a camera lens. Trying to capture little people in these little moments, as if they existed without us.

My dad had the good camera, the one with the heavy lens, my mother always had small point-and-shoots. She is not in many of the photos. She is in so few, in fact, that I can remember the ones she is distinctly. The black-and-white oversized shirt and the lipstick put on to cover up a day of cooking a turkey; the rolled-up jeans in the paddling pool; the hospital gown and plastic-rimmed glasses.

Last summer, my sister found a photograph of her we’d never seen before. “We both look so much like her!” she wrote. A revelation that should have been obvious but nevertheless retained its novelty. My mother took the photographs, took the canisters to be developed and put the glossy prints in an album. She was rarely in front of the lens.

My friends and I used to joke about how our partners didn’t take photographs of us, but since we became mothers that conversation feels more pertinent. Endless images made of our children with their fathers; looking playful, looking doting, looking handsome, looking tired but happy. And so few of us. When I am out with my friends and their children I make sure to take photographs of them mothering; of them when the light is good, of them holding one baby and talking to their older child, of them spooning things into mouths, of all the things they keep in a hand. All these acts of every day work and love, so rarely seen for what they are. I try to make a record of them.

These photographs are unlike the ones we used to take, when we were dressed up and effortless, when we were drunk or dancing or running through festival fields, bent double in laughter, showing off a new dress. Instead they catch the eye bags and the same jumpers we wear on repeat, the strange geometry of our post-birth bodies, the movements, the smiles and the shushing. Little about these photographs is perfect or posed. Instead, they are evidence: here we are, mothering.

I demand my husband takes these photos. “Evidence of mum!” I say, thrusting the camera at him. He agrees, and I try to arrange my face into something I will find acceptable to look back at. I try to push down the full-body self-consciousness that rises up. Sometimes I know it seems strange. Why document this, this moment of holding a clingy toddler while cooking lunch for 12 people in a swimming costume recorded for posterity. I am unable to explain that these are the parts of me I want committed to film, to memory. Look, look at everything she held at once.

Partially, I think, I want these photographs for a future self, the older woman who forgot the minutiae of it all. But mostly I want them for my son. I want him to know what I looked like when he was small, on the days when I hadn’t washed my hair or thought about my clothes. I want him to know what planes of his face he shares with mine.

In time, we stopped printing photos. We took snaps on grinding digital cameras, waited for the images to load up on little screens on the back. I found my father’s camera in the cupboard under the stairs and adopted as my own, began a whole other love affair with film. My mother’s children had children. We took photos and made shared albums we can access in the swipe of a finger, and in them the babies become toddlers become children. My mother is in these photos; she has stopped recoiling so much these days.

When they are developed, I send the photos to my friends. I never write captions, the images are enough. Here, look, I see you. Look how good and beautiful you are at this.

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