The Face We Hide

This will be a short post, as I try to quickly write before Cosmo wakes up. But there is something I’ve been wanting to share with you, my friends. I know many of you are wondering how things are going now that our surprise baby has made his appearance in the outside world, and I think I have a very easy way of showing you.

Recently we learned that our niece is pregnant. (So weird to be having a baby around the same time as my own niece). Steven was texting with her mother – his sister – and she asked how we were doing. It was, as usual, 9:30 at night and we had just finished riding and doing barn chores, and were finally starting on dinner. Steven sent her the picture below, with him making the very silly, melodramatic tired face.

But what he didn’t send her was the next one. This one was taken about a minute before the other picture. Steven had snuck into the kitchen, came up behind me, asked me to turn around, and snapped it.

The contrast between these two photos is obvious. Posed versus candid. One is the face you show; one is the face you hide. One is an image you control; the other is flawed reality. We all do it. But I love these two pictures because together, they are true.

We choose to show our best face for good reasons. For me, it’s about staying positive, having a good attitude, and wanting to be an encouragement to people around me rather than bringing them down. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but it’s also okay to show the other side of ourselves – the exhausted, irritable, struggling side. Neither of those sides of us is really who we are; they’re just who we are in moments. But you put them together, and you begin to get the whole picture. And in the end, the whole picture is endlessly more fascinating, powerful, and beautiful, than just one facet of it.